Kathleen Norris

Memoir, Poetry

Kathleen Norris is an award-winning essayist and poet. Her many publications include Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), The Cloister Walk (1996), Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1999), and Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life (2008). Exploring the spiritual life, her work is at once intimate and historical, rich in poetry and meditations, brimming with exasperation and reverence, deeply grounded in both nature and spirit, sometimes funny, often provocative, and always important.

Norris is the recipient of grants from the Bush and Guggenheim Foundations. She has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature; the CCL specifically thanked Norris for "having invited readers to accompany her on a career-long pilgrimage into the imaginative realm where Christianity and literature intersect in graced acts of poetry and prose."


Festival Years: 2002, 2008