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 other publications.
She is the 2023 recipient of a $5000 award from Nomadic Press and the San Francisco Foundation for Something Close: A Transatlantic Reckoning, a memoir in progress.
She was a 2020 columnist-in-residence for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Open Space. You can read her five essays and see her collages here and read a Kenyon Review interview with her here.
Norton is a dual citizen of the US and Ireland/EU who was born in Boston. She taught online at the Yeats Academy at IT Sligo/ATU from 2020-2022. In 2014, Dermot Healy chose her short memoir for inclusion in a Fish Anthology (that essay became the basis for her book Wite Out).
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.
In 2014 she received a Creative Work Fund award for a multimedia project about Black history, police violence, and mass incarceration. She has also 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 in residence at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester in June-July 2022, after her seventh research trip to Ireland. A member of ASCAP, she has collaborated with composer Eve Beglarian and interviewed her for the Herb Alpert Foundation.
Norton 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, and many other authors) and in oral history (at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley) before embarking on a teaching career at San Francisco State University and in Ireland at IT Sligo/ATU. She has also worked as a tutor at SFSU and with labor organizers at Unite Here.