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 Genealogy of Love, Shame, and Defiance, 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’s also a collage artist. Her work appears on the covers of her own books and on the covers of books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, Maureen Owen, and other writers. You can find many of Norton’s collages in her essays for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space.
She is the author of two chapbooks, Hesitation Kit (2007) and Dark White (2019). Her work appears in four anthologies (including, most recently, The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets, edited by Ayodele Nzinga and J. K. Fowler). You can read poems from The Public Gardens and Wite Out at the Poetry Foundation, and you can listen to “Landscaping for Privacy,” her collaboration with composer Eve Beglarian, here.
IN 2014, IRISH WRITER DERMOT HEALY chose Norton’s short memoir for inclusion in a Fish Anthology and 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 in Ireland (curated by Alice Lyons, subsidized with a travel grant from the US Embassy in Dublin).
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 at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester.
She has been a guest writer in many classrooms where her books have been on writing and literature syllabi, including Fred Moten's class at UC Riverside, C. D. Wright's class at Brown University, Katie Peterson's class at UC Davis, Maw Shein Win’s class at the University of San Francisco, Alice Lyons’ classes at IT Sligo/ATU in Ireland, and at California College of Art, San Francisco State University, CU Boulder, Athenian High School, and other institutions.
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 2002 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 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 and a member of the American Conference for Irish Studies, ASCAP, and the National Book Critics Circle.
