David Orr

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David Orr is a poet and critic. He holds a BA from Princeton University and a JD from Yale Law School. 

Orr is the author of the poetry collections The Marvels (Four Way Books, 2026) and Dangerous Household Items (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). He is the editor of the one hundredth anniversary edition of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken and Other Poems (Penguin Classics, 2015). 

Orr’s works of nonfiction are You, too, Could Write a Poem (Penguin, 2017); The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong (Penguin, 2016); and Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (HarperCollins, 2011).

Orr is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle. He is a longtime poetry critic for the New York Times and is a professor of poetry and the practice of criticism at Rutgers University. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.