Michelle Orange was born and raised in London, Ontario. After graduating from the University of Toronto (double major in English and film) she worked as a producer in the education and children’s divisions of TVOntario.
In 2003, she moved to New York City to join the graduate film studies program at New York University. Michelle’s writing has since appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Nation, Bookforum, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Slate, Tin House, 4 Columns, Frieze, the Village Voice, and other publications. She is a contributing editor at the Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is also a columnist. She is VQR’s 2019 winner of the Staige D. Blackford Prize for nonfiction.
She is the editor of From the Notebook: The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a collection published in issue 22 of McSweeney’s featuring stories by Sigrid Nunez, Miriam Toews, Lydia Millet, and many more. Her work appears in several anthologies, including Best Sex Writing 2006 and Should I Go to Grad School? (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Best Canadian Essays 2020.
She teaches in the graduate writing programs at Goucher College and Columbia University, and has been an invited guest and speaker at various institutions, including Yale University, New York University, Goucher College, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of San Francisco.
This Is Running for Your Life: Essays, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2013, was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, the National Post, Flavorwire, and other publications.
Pure Flame, her second book of nonfiction, was published by FSG in June, 2021.
She lives in Brooklyn.