Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of The New York Times bestsellers The Cloister Walk, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, and The Virgin of Bennington. 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, and often provocative.

Kathleen Norris’ first book of poems, Falling Off, was the 1971 winner of the Big Table Younger Poets Award. Her other books of poetry include Journey: New and Selected Poems, and Little Girls in Church.

In 1974 she moved with her husband to South Dakota which inspired her first nonfiction book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Dakota was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was selected as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal.

In 1986 she became an oblate, or associate, of a Benedictine monastery, Assumption Abbey in North Dakota. Subsequently, she spent two years in residence at the Ecumenical (now Collegeville) Institute at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Her book, The Cloister Walk, is structured as a diary of her monastic experience interspersed with meditations on virgin saints, Emily Dickinson, celibacy, loneliness, monogamy, and a hymnist of the early church, Ephrem of Syria.

Her New York Times Notable Book Amazing Grace continues her theme that the spiritual world is rooted in the chaos of daily life. In this book, she sheds light on the very difficult theological concepts such as grace, repentance, dogma, and faith. Blending history, theology, storytelling, etymology, and memoir, she grounds these religious concepts in the world in which we live. Her New York Times bestselling Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life is a study of acedia, the ancient word for the spiritual side of sloth. Her memoir, The Virgin of Bennington, follows her from her sheltered youth to her entrée into the New York art world as she describes the internal and external journey of an artistic young woman trying to find a place for herself amid the cultural tumult of the 1960’s and 70’s.  Norris also appears on the DVD and companion workbook titled Embracing a Life of Meaning: Kathleen Norris on Discovering What Matters.

A weekly newsletter, Soul Telegram: Movies & Meaning, written with Gareth Higgins inspired the book A Whole Life in Twelve Movies: A Cinematic Journey to a Deeper Spirituality. Her memoir about her neurodivergent sister Becky titled Rebecca Sue: A Sister’s Reflections on Disability, Faith, and Love was a finalist for the 2026 Christian Book Award®. She is currently working on her next book, Finding God in the Desert: How Monastic Spirituality Revived My Faith (IVP, Fall 2027), in which she writes about the people known as the ‘desert mothers and fathers’ of the early Christian church and connects their teachings to everyday life.

Widowed in 2003, Kathleen Norris now divides her time between South Dakota and Honolulu, Hawaii, where she volunteers at an Episcopal church. She travels to the mainland regularly to speak to students, medical professionals, social workers, and chaplains at colleges and universities, as well as churches and teaching hospitals. Her honors include grants from the Echoing Green Foundation, the Bush Foundation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts. For many years she was the poetry editor of Spirituality & Health magazine. She also serves as an editorial advisor to Give Us This Day.

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