Linda Norton is the author of  The Public Gardens: Poems and History (2011; introduction by Fanny Howe), a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Wite Out: Love and Work, which John Keene and Eileen Myles call a “masterpiece” and Norman Fischer calls “a gorgeous, courageous book.” She is also the author of two chapbooks, Hesitation Kit (2007) and Dark White (2019). Poems, essays, and collages from her new hybrid manuscript, Cloud of Witnesses, have been published in spoKe, The Progressive, Hanging Loose Magazine, and many other publications.

Norton is the 2023 recipient of a $5000 award from Nomadic Press and the San Francisco Foundation for an excerpt from Something Close: A Transatlantic Reckoning, a non-fiction work in progress that will be the final volume in the trilogy that started with The Public Gardens and Wite Out.

She was a 2020 columnist-in-residence for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Open Space. In 2014, Irish writer Dermot Healy chose her short memoir for inclusion in a Fish Anthology. In 2014 Norton received a Creative Work Fund award for a multimedia community project in East Oakland.

That same year, Norton exhibited her collages at a show in the Dock Arts Centre (curated by Alice Lyons, subsidized with a travel grant from the US Embassy in Ireland). Her art appears on the covers of her own books and on books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, and other writers. She has given readings and talks at The Word in Sligo, at SoundEye in Cork, the Poetry Center at SFSU, Harvard, UC Boulder, UC Riverside, Pierogi Gallery, PPOW Gallery, the American Literature Association (Amiri Baraka panel), and at many other universities, bookstores, and galleries.

Norton has been an artist in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, the Ucross Foundation, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony, and will be writing at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester in June-July 2022.

She has been a guest writer in many classrooms where her books have been on writing and literature syllabi (e.g., Fred Moten's class at UC Riverside, C. D. Wright's class at Brown, Katie Peterson's class at UC Davis, and classes at California College of Art, San Francisco State University, CU Boulder, and other institutions). Among the most moving things to occur in her life as a writer: finding a quotation from The Public Gardens in C. D. Wright's posthumously published book, The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All.

Norton worked for many years in publishing at the University of California Press in New York and Berkeley, where she founded the New California Poetry series and published books by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Yunte Huang, and many other authors. From 2022 to 2017, she was an editor (and occasional curator) at the Oral History Center in the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

In 2016 she embarked on a teaching career at San Francisco State University and then in Ireland at IT Sligo/ATU. She has taught first-year composition and reading and writing in many genres, including nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama, and has also worked as a tutor for students at SFSU and labor organizers at Unite Here.

Norton was born in Boston, lived and worked in Brooklyn from 1987-1995, and moved to Oakland in 1995. She is a dual citizen of the US and Ireland/EU.