Vanessa Norton

Vanessa Norton is a writer and teacher based in San Francisco. In Nebraska, she will work on a collection of short stories. Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, she spent much of her adolescence exploring abandoned buildings and industry along Lake Erie. Her collected imagery, coupled with residual Catholicism, led her to leave home a day after high school graduation to become a nomadic Marxist. Since then, she has traveled and worked in several countries and written several articles and stories. Now, relatively settled in a sand-surrounded house, she writes about people in physical and psychological exile, people who have detached themselves from the norm due to an unsettled past wound. She writes about the strange and predictable forms in which escape manifests. Vanessa received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Gender Studies from Bard College and a Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Oregon.