Background

Kathleen Norris was born on July 27, 1947, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. She is a daughter of John Heyward and Lois Feme Norris (maiden name Totten).

Education

Kathleen Norris grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she was brought by her parents as a child, as well as on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Lemmon, South Dakota where she spent almost every summer.

Norris finished Punahou Preparatory School in 1965. Then, she pursued her studies at Bennington College, Vermont. She graduated four years later with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Career

Kathleen Norris started her career at the early 1970s when she relocated to New York City. She quickly found a job of a program assistant at the Academy of American Poets where she served from 1969 to 1974.

While in the city, Norris became involved in the local art scene with its avant-garde representatives, including Andy Warhol. First Norris’s book of poems, ‘Falling Off’, saw the print in 1971. Except for a small volume of four illustrated poems, however, the book was to be Norris’s last collection for ten subsequent years.

In 1974, after the death of her grandmother, Kathleen Norris inherited her parent’s house in Lemmon, South Dakota, and moved there with her husband, poet David Dwyer, to manage a family farm corporation, Leaves of Grass, and to write. Initially planned to be a temporary relocation, it lasted for the next 23 years. In addition to managing family ranch corporation, Kathleen Norris also served as an assistant librarian at one of the local libraries from 1976 to 1991. Almost the same time, she was a poet-in-residence in North Dakota Arts Council, Fargo.

The next volume of Norris, ‘The Middle of the World’, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1981. It was followed by other poetry collections, including ‘Common Things’ in 1990, and another full-length volume of poems five years later.

Soon after moving to the rural area, Kathleen Norris explored the local Benedictine abbey and the spirituality of the Great Plains. Eventually, she became an oblate in 1986, and as a layperson who had taken limited monastic vows in harmony with her worldly and marital life, she “walked” with the monks without being precisely one of them. In the process, Norris became more deeply familiar with and appreciative of Roman Catholic theology and practices. She also preached at Hope and Spencer Memorial Presbyterian churches, in Keldron and Lemmon, and taught poetry in rural schools.

Norris had, at that point, broken into public recognition with her first nonfiction book, ‘Dakota: A Spiritual Geography’. In the tradition of Annie Dillard and Gretel Ehrlich, Norris found in the land, in this case, the farmland of the Great Plains, the inspiration for religious musings and personal renewal. Critical response to the volume was overwhelming, and the book, which had only a 2,500-copy first printing, sold more than one-hundred-thousand copies in hardcover. Critical response arose in much the same key for Norris’s follow-up volume, ‘The Cloister Walk’, which saw the print three years later. This book focused more intensely on the side of Norris’s life that touched organized religion and monasticism.

In 2000, Norris exchanged the farmhouse in Lemmon for a house in Honolulu, Hawaii. After the death of her husband three years later, Kathleen Norris remained in the area lecturing from time to time on the mainland.

One of the latest Norris’s publications is a 2009 book ‘Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, And A Writer's Life’.

Achievements

• A poet throughout her writing career, Kathleen Norris came into public recognition due to a couple of spiritual memoirs, ‘Dakota: A Spiritual Geography’, and ‘The Cloister Walk’.
  
  Norris’s talent in writing has been marked by such awards like Big Table Poetry Series Younger Poets Award, and Western Libraries Association Award. She has also been a recipient of Creative Artists Public Service Program grant, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, Bush Foundation grant, and Guggenheim Foundation grant.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life

    (An examination of acedia in the light of psychology, spir...)

    2008
  • The Holy Twins: Benedict and Scholastica

    (Offers the tale about two amazing twins, Benedict and Sch...)

    2001
  • Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

    (A beautiful meditation on life in the Great Plains from a...)

    1993
  • The Cloister Walk

    (A spiritual journey that brings joy to the meanings of lo...)

    1996
  • Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

    (A book about Christianity, spirituality, and rediscovered...)

    1998
  • The Year of Common Things 1988
  • The Virgin of Bennington 2001
  • Falling off 1971
  • Little Girls in Church 1995

Membership

Kathleen Norris has been a member of the Poetry Society of America and of the National Book Critics Circle.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "A poet who with wit, sharp intelligence, joy, and an all-seeing eye praises life from the ordinary to the sublime." Geraldine C. Little, author, critic

Connections

Kathleen Norris was a wife of a poet, translator, and computer programmer David J. Dwyer till his death in 2003.

Father:

John Heyward Norris

Mother:

Lois Feme Norris

Late Husband:

David J. Dwyer