Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris (born July 27, 1947) is an American poet and essayist.

Biography Kathleen Norris was born in Washington, D.C., on July 27, 1947. As a child, Norris moved to Hawaii with her parents, John Norris and Lois Totten, and in 1965 graduated from Punahou Preparatory School. Growing up, she spent most summers in her grandparents' town, Lemmon, South Dakota. Norris's youngest sister, Rebecca, was born with perinatal hypoxia.

After graduating from Bennington College in Vermont in 1969, Norris became arts administrator of the Academy of American Poets, and published her first book of poetry two years later. In 1974 she inherited her grandparents' farm in Lemmon, South Dakota, and moved there with her husband, poet David Dwyer.

In Lemmon, she joined Spencer Memorial Presbyterian church, and discovered the spirituality of the Great Plains. In 1986, Norris started writing non-fiction after becoming a Benedictine oblate at Assumption Abbey in Richardton, North Dakota, and spending extended periods at Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. At this period in her career, one of her focuses was death and depression. In 1998, Norris gave the Madeleva lecture at Saint Mary's College (Indiana), a lecture which became the basis for The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women’s Work". Also that year, she received an honorary doctorate degree from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, for her interwoven writings on the Dakotas and her faith.

After the death of her husband in 2003, Norris moved back to Hawaii. , she attends an Episcopal church in Hawaii.

Published books

Non-Fiction Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston/New York City 1993, (pbk.) (awarded "Notable Book" status by The New York Times) The Cloister Walk (Riverhead Books, 1996) Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1998) The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work" (1998) The Virgin of Bennington (Penguin, 2001) The Holy Twins: Benedict and Scholastica (Putnam, 2001) Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, And A Writer's Life (Riverhead Books, 2008) Rebecca Sue: A Sister's Reflections on Disability, Faith, and Love. InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. (2025)

Poetry Falling Off (1971) The Middle of the World (1981) The Year of Common Things (1988) Little Girls in Church (1995) Journey: New and Selected Poems, 1969–1999. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2001.

Norris has also been a regular contributor to such magazines as Christian Century.