LINDA NORTON is the author of The Public Gardens: Poems and History (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 the 2023 recipient of a $5000 award from Nomadic Press and the San Francisco Foundation for an excerpt from Something Close: A Transatlantic Reckoning, a non-fiction book about three generations of Irish (Kerry) women, migration, “illegitimacy,” reproductive rights, and mental health. Cloud of Witnesses, a book of essays, poetry, and visual art, will be published by BlazeVOX in 2024.

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 Art’s Open Space.

IN 2014, IRISH WRITER DERMOT HEALY chose Norton’s short memoir for inclusion in an Irish 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 (curated by Alice Lyons, subsidized with a travel grant from the US Embassy in Dublin). From 2020-2022, she taught online at the Yeats Academy, ATU Sligo.

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 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 US and Ireland/EU.