Kathleen Norris's books of poetry include The Middle of the World, Little Girls in Church, and The Astronomy of Love. In addition to her best-selling memoirs (all listed as New York Times Notable Books), her most recent prose works include Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and "Women's Work," The Virgin of Bennington (a memoir) and a children's book on Sts. Benedict and Scholastica (in collaboration with the artist Tomie de Paola) are forthcoming. 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. She lives in South Dakota and Honolulu, Hawaii.

Their apparent simplicity wrought with subtlety and resonance, Norris's poems are characterized by generosity and compassion, as plain and spacious as the prairie life that engendered them.