Robert Morgan, author of The Oratorio That Was Time (2022), has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently Dark Energy (2015) and Terroir (2011). He has also published twelve volumes of fiction, including Gap Creek (1999), a New York Times bestseller. A sequel, The Road from Gap Creek, published in 2013 that received the 2014 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was followed by the novel Chasing the North Star (2016) and As Rain Turns to Snow and Other Stories (2017). In addition, Morgan is the author of three nonfiction books, Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry (1993); Boone: A Biography (2007); and Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion (2011).

Morgan has been awarded the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Arts Council. In 2013 he received the History Award Medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution. His first play, Homemade Yankees, was awarded the East Tennessee Civil War Alliance John Cullum Drama Prize. He has served as visiting writer at Davidson College and at Furman, Duke, Appalachian State, and East Carolina universities. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2010.

Morgan was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina in 1944. He taught from 1971 to 2022 at Cornell University, where he was Kappa Alpha Professor of English.