Journey

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.

Norris, whose poetry collections include The Middle of the World, reached a wide audience with her prose memoir Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Readers of that book will recognize here her closely considered relationship with the prairie; her persistent and delighted spiritual questioning; her respectful identification with other women both ordinary and extraordinary; and her joy in stories. . . . Norris's poems are characterized by generosity and compassion, as plain and spacious as the prairie life that has engendered many of them.