Norton was the 2023 recipient of a $5000 award from Nomadic Press/San Francisco Foundation for an excerpt from The Ruins: A Memoir of Irish Women Lost and Found, a non-fiction work in progress that will be the final volume in the trilogy that started with The Public Gardens and Wite Out. (Visit Norton’s Substack The Ruins for more about the book.) Harvard Review published Norton’s account about the first of her ten trips to Ireland in 1993.
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 her collages and essays at 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 five anthologies (including, most recently, The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets, edited by Ayodele Nzinga and J. K. Fowler). Read poems from The Public Gardens and Wite Out at the Poetry Foundation and 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.
She’s given readings and talks at the Peoples Museum and the American Conference for Irish Studies in Limerick, 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, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony, and the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester.
Norton had a long and distinguished career 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.
From 2016-2023 she taught reading, writing, and literature in four genres at SFSU and at the Yeats Academy at ATU/Sligo in Ireland.
Born in Boston, she 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 San Francisco’s Writer’s Grotto, Page Street Writers, the National Book Critics Circle, and ASCAP.
