A prolific essayist, bestselling memoirist, award-winning poet, and occasional preacher, Kathleen Norris writes between worlds. In over a dozen books of poetry and prose, she meditates on love, loss, faith, community, and solitude. Her work travels across the landscapes of her life, including New York City of the late 60s and early 70s; the South Dakota plains, where she lived for over a quarter of a century; and a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota, where she lived as an oblate. Norris’s lyrical yet plainspoken philosophical inquiries continue to attract a wide readership and critical acclaim.

Born in Washington, D.C., on July 27, 1947, Norris moved around the U.S. throughout her childhood, spending most summers in Lemmon, South Dakota, on her grandparents’ farm. By adolescence, her family had settled in Hawaii, and she attended high school in Honolulu. She grew up surrounded by books and music; her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father played the cello in the Honolulu Symphony. Raised Protestant, Norris’s family had deep roots in religious tradition—her paternal grandfather was a Methodist pastor—but Norris’s connection to the church ebbed as she grew older. When she started at Bennington College in Vermont, she turned to poetry. “I read and wrote poems as if my life depended on it,” she recalls.

In her senior year of college, Norris’s path took a consequential turn: she interviewed for a job as an assistant to Academy of American Poets Director Elizabeth Kray, a formidable force in New York’s literary scene who went on to co-found Poets House. Kray hired Norris, who began work during the winter term of her senior year and returned after graduating in the fall of 1969. She showed her the ropes of the literary world and supported her early efforts as a poet. “I think of Betty as my first reader, of both my life and my art,” says Norris. While at the Academy, Norris met established writers such as James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and Jean Valentine. She also befriended young countercultural figures, including Jim Carroll, then working on The Basketball Diaries, and Gerard Malanga, part of Andy Warhol’s circle.

Just two years out of college, Norris won the Big Table Younger Poets Award in 1971 and published her first collection of poetry, Falling Off, which features poems that move through various landscapes, particularly New York City: “There is nothing now in sight / Except the city, vertical / And bottomless, / where the worst things happen / And everything stays the same,” she writes in the title poem. The prestige of the Big Table award, a publication prize that had previously gone to Andrei Codrescu and Bill Knott, made her the envy of other young poets—a status she did not relish. While Norris learned to navigate the “charged and seductive environment” of writers and artists seeking stardom in 1970s New York, she decided to try a quieter life upon the inheritance of her grandmother’s house and farmland in Lemmon, South Dakota—a small town of fewer than 2,000 people. She moved to Lemmon in 1974 with the poet David Dwyer, whom she married, and they remained there together for over 25 years.

In Lemmon, Norris became involved in the small-town life of her neighbors—“ranchers, truck drivers, tavern owners, contractors, and merchants.” She worked at the town’s public library and in an artists-in-the-schools programs. She also began to attend the Presbyterian church that her grandmother had been a member of for 60 years, going on to preach occasionally at the church and eventually becoming a Benedictine oblate at a monastery in North Dakota.  Her life on the Great Plains informed her poetry—her next full-length poetry collection was The Middle of the World (1981)—and the break-out memoir, Dakota: A Spiritual Biography (1993). Dakota was named a New York Times Notable Book and praised by reviewer Robert Coles for its “meditative intensity and originality worthy of James Agee's response over a half-century ago to Hale County, Alabama, or William Carlos Williams's extended examination in verse of Paterson, New Jersey.”

This “meditative intensity and originality” also characterizes her subsequent books. Her memoir The Cloister Walk (1997) explores Norris’s experience in residence with Benedictine monks at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota and meditates on the sacredness of poetry, biblical texts, and monastic life. The language of the church and theology become lenses for contemporary experience in her subsequent memoirs Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1999) and Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (2008), the latter being a meditation, in part, on caring for her husband during the last years of his life. Norris’s poetry also intertwines the humble particularities of life and the profundities of worship in such collections as Little Girls in Church (1995) and Journey: New and Selected Poems (2001). The Virgin of Bennington (2002) stands apart as a kind of prequel to Dakota; it details her time in college, her early years as a poet in New York City, her devotion to Elizabeth Kray, and her decision to move to Lemmon.

Norris now divides her time between Lemmon and Honolulu and travels around the country to give talks and teach at churches, colleges, and hospitals. Her books, which weave together reflections on literature, history, religion, and daily life, continue to make her “one of the most eloquent yet earthbound spiritual writers of our time” (San Francisco Chronicle).

—Co-written by Suzanne Wise & Valentine Conaty

Over the past 60 years, Ed Colker has created numerous fine-press limited-edition books, portfolios, broadsides, and other works on paper that feature poetry, typically alongside his own celebrated drawings and prints—luminous abstractions that gesture toward landscape, figure, or calligraphic propulsion. “Ed Colker has done more than anyone I know to make poetry visible,” writes poet Kathleen Norris of the renowned artist behind Editions du Grenier and its successor Haybarn Press. Colker’s work showcases international writing by contemporary poets, as well as earlier figures from Marianne Moore and René Char to Baudelaire and Whitman. A particular emphasis of the press has been the work of Jewish poets, such as Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan, and the great Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. Collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and other prestigious institutions, Colker’s collaborations with poets display his sensitivity to language as a writer and an avid reader who has maintained longtime friendships with poets. 

Born in 1927 to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Colker was raised in a Yiddish- and English-speaking household in Philadelphia. His boyhood was shaped by involvement in the arts, an appreciation for books, and participation in a vibrant Jewish community. He sang in choirs under conductor and renowned composer of Yiddish songs Lazar Weiner, worked on his high school’s Yiddish-language newspaper as an illustrator, and developed a keen sense of social justice as modeled in his community through trade union organizing and activism. After high school, he was awarded a scholarship to study art at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (later the University of the Arts). During World War II, his studies were interrupted for two years by service in the 88^th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, where he fought in the disputed Yugoslav-Italian border area of Venezia Giulia.

Colker’s path toward becoming a master printmaker quickly took shape after his graduation from art school. Starting in the early 1950s, he garnered solo exhibitions at galleries in New York and Philadelphia, and his work was included in the 1953 exhibition Young American Printmakers at the Museum of Modern Art. His prints from these early years have been praised for their hybrid qualities of surrealism and abstract expressionism. A Guggenheim fellowship enabled him to study and work in Europe in the early 1960s, and he visited the printers of artwork by Picasso, Léger, and Villon. In France, he also met with Pierre A. Benoit, editor and hand printer of small editions by Picasso, Bracque, and Dubuffet: an encounter that planted the seed for future collaborations with poets. Regarding this meeting, Colker says, “I saw the notion of total direction of creative possibility. You’re independent of the publishing industry…You’re free of the art gallery world, separate from the marketing networks. You’re engaged in a labor of love for a small but appreciative audience.”

In the early 1960s, Colker began to create prints in response to poetry, and in 1966, he moved with his wife, the artist Elaine Galen, and their children to rural Hampton, New Jersey, where Editions du Grenier (later Haybarn Press) was founded in a former barn. His printmaking techniques came to include lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, and pochoir, a technique of hand-colored stencil-based printing. Exquisite use of quality papers, cloth-covered wrappers, and boxes that create an environment for the reading experience are among the elements that came to distinguish Colker’s work. In the latter part of this decade, Colker also held academic positions, including as Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the mid-1970s, the press’s operations were moved to Chicago, after Colker became Research Professor and Director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois. During this time, he started to create artwork in response to the poetry of Michael Anania and Kathleen Norris. In the coming decades, he produced a number of editions with both poets under the Haybarn Press imprint, resulting from conversations and exchange of work.

Colker re-established the press’s headquarters in Mount Kisco, New York, in 1983, and in the next few decades he created works in response to writings by Emerson, Whitman, and the German-speaking Jewish poet Rose Ausländer, among others. His career as an educator continued to blossom: he was Professor of Art and Dean of the School of Visual Arts at SUNY Purchase, where he developed the Center for Edition Works, and Professor and Chair of the Art Department at Cornell University. He also held Provost positions at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Cooper Union in Manhattan, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

In the new millennium, Haybarn Press emerged to feature themes of justice, resistance, and inclusivity. Single-author editions and portfolios feature artwork by Colker in response to text by Abraham Sutzkever, a partisan fighter in World War II who wrote poetry about the Holocaust. Another such offering is Open the Gates, a portfolio inspired by jazz great Dave Brubeck’s cantata The Gates of Justice, includes song text, as well as texts from the Hebrew Bible, the Union Prayer book, the writings of Hillel, and the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.  During this time, Colker also produced anthologies: some gather emerging and under-recognized authors alongside acclaimed voices. Continuing his career-long interest in international poetry, Voices to Share includes poetry translated from the French, Spanish, German, Italian, Korean, Yiddish, and Wintu. Haybarn Press also printed a series featuring drawings by Elaine Galen relating to women of antiquity and mythology.

As New York Times art critic D. Dominick Lombardi observes, “The works Mr. Colker produced in collaboration with poets were no mere illustrations. Instead, he produced pure expressions, stirring symbols of inner truths or imaginings that can sometimes be inspired by or incite poetry.” Still active as an artist, Ed Colker continues to induce both inspiration and incitement. In 2018, he released Daughters of Emily, featuring his artwork and poems from eleven women poets. In addition to the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian, his work can be found in the collections of a number of institutions, including the Getty Research Institute; Worcester Art Museum; Library of Congress; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford Universities; and the New York Public Library. Vassar College holds in its library’s special collections a complete archive of his editions with poetry, from 1960 to 2019.

—Suzanne Wise

Images above, from top to bottom: November 1955 (linocut, 1955); To Frost, Williams, Cummings and Stevens (lithograph, 1968); three poems about the sounds of Jazz and the snow in Buffalo by Michael Anania (with drawings by Ed Colker, 2002); from Daughters of Emily (2018); Open the Gates (2006); from Voices to Share (2011); assorted portfolios.