Orner is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He has taught at San Francisco State University, The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, The Warren Wilson MFA Program, The University of Montana, Washington University, Miami University, Bard College, and Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. A film version of one of Orner's stories, "The Raft", with a screenplay by Orner and director Rob Jones, and starring Edward Asner has played a number of film festivals. In 2016, Orner released a collection of essays, "Am I Alone Here?", which was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards in their Criticism category. The book has garnered positive reviews in "The New York Times", the New Yorker, and a number of other publications. Orner's newest collection of stories, Maggie Brown & Others, was released on July 2, 2019, and has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. His older brother is Eric Orner, the creator of the comic "The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green". He also has two younger siblings, William and Rebecca Orner. Orner has a long-time association with Camp Nebagamon, an overnight camp at Lake Nebagamon in northern Wisconsin, where he has been a counselor, wilderness trip leader, and village director. He has also worked as human rights observer in Chiapas, Mexico, a cab driver in Iowa City, and a sewer department worker for the city of Highland Park, Illinois, where he once worked side-by-side with Alex Gordon, a Chicago-based journalist and author of "College: The Best Five Years of Your Life".