Linda Norton

Linda Norton is the author of The Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer, 2011) with an introduction by Fanny Howe, a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Wite Out: Love and Work (Hanging Loose Press, 2020), which John Keene and Eileen Myles call a “masterpiece” and Norman Fischer calls “a gorgeous, courageous book.” She was the 2023 recipient of a $5000 award from Nomadic Press and the San Francisco Foundation for an excerpt from Something Close, a memoir and investigation that will be the final volume in the trilogy that started with The Public Gardens and Wite Out. BlazeVOX will publish her book Cloud of Witnesses: Essays, Poems, Collages in 2024. She is the author of two chapbooks, Hesitation Kit (Etherdome Press, 2007) and Dark White (Omertà, 2019). Her work appears in five anthologies, including The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets. 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 at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester. 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. 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 U.S. and Ireland/E.U.