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