Nick Norwood

Nick Norwood was born in DeQueen, Arkansas, in 1962. Educated at the University of Texas-Arlington, the University of North Texas, and Arizona State University, he currently teaches writing and literature at Columbus State University in Georgia. He is the author of three books of poetry: The Soft Blare (2003), A Palace for the Heart (2004), and Wrestle (2007), the last being a fine press book he produced in collaboration with the artist and master printer Erika Adams. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Western Humanities Review, The Southwest Review, Pleiades, Ekphrasis, Poetry Daily, and in a number of other journals, online magazines, and anthologies. He has twice received fellowships to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been a Visiting Fellow of Greyfriars Hall at Oxford University. He is the winner of an International Merit Award from Atlanta Review and a Mellen Press Poetry Award, and he has been a finalist or semifinalist for the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, The Verse Prize, The Morton Marr Poetry Contest, and the Vassar Miller Prize.
Nick Norwood’s family is from Lamar County Texas, where he has ancestors going back to the time of the Texas Republic. His maternal grandfather was a tenant cotton farmer from Halesboro; his paternal grandfather, a farmer-turned-heavy equipment-operator from nearby Cunningham. His grandmothers—Estelle Tidwell Chesshire and Virginia Harvey Norwood—were from Deport and Milton, respectively. In November of 1969, while flying pipeline for an oil company, his father was killed in a crash near Olney, Texas, and his mother’s subsequent remarriage was to an artillery officer. He has lived in, among other Texas towns, Clarksville, Deport, Paris, Wichita Falls, Abilene, El Paso, and Texarkana. Outside the state, in addition to DeQueen and Columbus, he has lived in Lawton, Oklahoma, Mesa, Arizona, and Neu Ulm, Germany.