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Norma Clark Wilson is a poet, essayist, environmentalist, editor and University of South Dakota Professor Emerita. Her poetry expresses the love of nature and music of words that she felt in her childhood and feels more deeply today. Norma was born and raised in Clarksville, Tennessee. She learned to appreciate the sound of words from her father, James Page Clark, and her mother, Gertrude Barton Clark. But she was deeply troubled by her parents’ unhappy relationship. When Norma was nine years old, Gertrude entered a mental hospital, and remained there for eight years. Fortunately Norma’s paternal grandparents, sister and brother, aunts, uncles, father and teachers gave her love and support. Her studies, her friends and the joy of baton twirling helped her survive her mother’s absence.

            She entered Austin Peay State University in her hometown with baton-twirling and academic scholarships and wrote her first poem for an English assignment to write fifty lines of heroic couplets. Her poem was inspired by pines her father had planted on a hillside to prevent soil erosion. In December 1966 she married her high school sweetheart and transferred to Tennessee Technological University. She completed a BA in English at TTU in 1968.

            She and her first husband moved back to Clarksville, and Norma taught middle school English at nearby Fort Campbell, Kentucky. At the end of that year she was offered an assistantship in English at Austin Peay, and she went to work on a master’s degree. While she was completing her thesis, she learned of her husband’s infidelity. While taking a creative writing course, she began to realize that writing poetry could help her better understand and move on with her life. By the time her divorce was finalized in the fall of 1970, Norma had a MA and was teaching English at Montgomery Central High School. With the advice of former professors, she applied to the University of Oklahoma English Department for an assistantship.

            In 1971, at the age of twenty-five, Norma moved to Norman to enter OU’s doctoral program in English. She became actively involved with the local community of poets by participating in readings, writing almost daily and submitting poems to Windmill. She wrote poems about her childhood, realizing how much she loved and missed her relatives. As president of the English Forum at OU, she helped host James Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Carter Revard, Alice Walker and others who came to read there. Her poetry was inspired and influenced by hearing them. In 1973, she fell in love with and married fellow English doctoral student and nature lover, Jerry Wilson. They honeymooned in Mexico.

            Norma’s first book, Wild Iris, about life in Tennessee and Oklahoma, was published by Point Riders Press of Norman, Oklahoma in1978. At the same time she was completing her dissertation, “The Spirit of Place in Native American Poetry.” That summer she was offered a position in the English Department at University of South Dakota, and she and Jerry moved to Vermillion. After she moved to South Dakota Norma was able to re-establish a close relationship with her mother, who came to visit her each summer. Norma continued to write and present readings of her poetry while teaching at USD. She also acquired funding to bring Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice, Lance Henson, Linda Hogan, Simon J. Ortiz, Alison Hedge Coke, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Carter Revard and many other Native American poets to the USD campus so that her students could better understand and be inspired by their work.

            Meanwhile, her own poetry was published in South Dakota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Canberra Times, South Dakota Magazine The Point Riders Press Great Plains Poetry Anthology, Horizons: The South Dakota Writers’Anthology and elsewhere. She was a featured poet in South Dakota’s Writer Reads series, the Corn Palace’s On Common Ground Traveling Exhibit, the Sioux Falls Horse Barn Art Center’s “Poets, Petals, Paintings” exhibit, and at Sioux Falls Jazz Fest. Norma served on the South Dakota Humanities Council’s Board of Directors from 1992-2001, and as Chair from 1997-99.

            Norma helped her mother, Gertrude Clark, move to Vermillion in 1991. Gerttrude enjoyed living in her own house and being part of the community and close to her beloved family. She remained there until her death in 2002. Increasingly Norma has   valued the influence of her mother on her writing and her life.

            Norma’s book The Nature of Native American Poetry, a study of the work of eight Native poets within the contexts of their cultures, was published by University of New Mexico Press in 2001. Influenced by the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, in 2002 she wrote a manuscript of poems in Mojácar, Spain during a writing residency she received from Fundacion Valparaiso. She taught literature and writing at the University of South Dakota for 27 years before retiring in 2005 as English Professor Emerita.

            From 2006-2024 Norma conducted annual Haiku writing workshops for fifth and sixth graders on the Missouri Riverside as part of River Appreciation Day at Clay County Park.  From 2008-2012, Norma served as President of Vermillion Area Arts Council. She promoted the juxtaposition of different genres of art, that when presented together enhanced each other. The VAAC’s Washington Street Art Center in Vermillion hosted poetry readings for the University of South Dakota’s Women and Gender Studies Conference, as well as book signings and readings by individual authors. In December 2010, the VAAC’s Art Center Gallery hosted River, Mound, Prairie, Sky: Visual Art and Poetry Celebrating Our Natural Environment which featured the work of 30 artists and poets.

            In 2012, Norma’s book Under the Rainbow: Poems from Mojácar was published by Finishing Line Press. Poet Carter Revard wrote of this book: “The poems in Under the Rainbow deepen as we read them and stay with us afterwards. They speak with truth, beauty and sometimes sly humor, of a loving marriage with the world.”

            In 2013, Steve Boint of Sioux Falls invited Norma to edit the 2014 Scurfpea poetry anthology. Following the publication of that book, Memory, Echo, Words, Scurfpea has published two books of her poetry as well as individual poems she has submitted to anthologies.

            Norma began collaborating with mosaicist Nancy Losacker to create poetry and visual art for Sioux Falls’ Washington Pavilion’s P3 exhibits in 2008, and P3 exhibited four of their collaborations between 2008 and 2013. Norma and Nancy received a collaboration grant from the South Dakota Arts Council in 2013. This enabled them to create enough additional collaborations for a series of Rivers, Wings & Sky exhibits in Mt. Marty College’s Bede Gallery, Yankton, SD (2013); University of South Dakota’s Atrium Gallery in I.D. Weeks Library, Vermillion, SD (2014); Spirit Room, Fargo, ND (2014); Vangarde Arts, Sioux City, IA (2015); Dahl Arts Center, Rapid City, SD (2015); Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, IA (2016) and Center for Western Studies, Augustana University, Sioux Falls, SD (2016). With a media grant award from South Dakota Humanites Council they created a Power point presentation that included thirteen collaborative pairings. Subsequently, in 2016, Scurfpea released a book of their collaborations, Rivers, Wings & Sky. Shirley Sneve says in her introduction, “These pages are about relationships. Nancy’s mosaics bring vivid imagery to Norma’s poetry of place and of people’s struggles to preserve the environment—throughout history and now.”

            Norma’s next book of poetry, Frog Creek Road, published by Scurfpea in 2019, is a seasonal series of poems about her family’s life on the prairie bluff northwest of Vermillion where she and her husband still live and work. Introducing this book, David Allan Evans said, “Like Mary Oliver, she celebrates, with knowledge and with joy, the rawness and beauty of the natural world. Like the ancient Eastern poets, she knows that all things belong and that all things, and all events, are connected.”

            Norma’s most recent book of poems, Continuity, was published by Gyroscope Press of Gillette, Wyoming in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Editor Constance Brewer says, “The musicality in Norma Wilson’s Continuity invites the reader to relax and savor a trip to the prairie, and embrace the power of Spirit Mound to refresh and heal.” Reviewing this book for Briar Cliff Review, Jeanne Emmons states, “In language at once straightforward and lyrical, Wilson presents us with a world view that is open-hearted, accepting and generous. These poems are of great humanity and consummate love, of both nature and humankind.”

            Since her retirement, Norma’s poems have been published in South Dakota Review, Briar Cliff Review, Caduceus, Paddlefish, South Dakota Magazine, Pasque Petals, South Dakota in Poems, Perspectives from the Prairie, Our South Dakota and elsewhere. She has been a featured reader at the Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, at Northeast Community College in Norfolk, Nebraska, and at The South Dakota Festival of Books. She mentored poets in Badger Clark’s Cabin at Newton Fork Ranch for Hill City Arts Council’s Writer’s Workshop in 2015. She served as Secretary of the South Dakota State Poetry Society’s Board of Directors from 2017-2020 and remains an active member of the SDSPS. She was the featured poet at the Spring 2021 WYO Poets Workshop in Gillette, Wyoming. She is a member of the Women Poets Collective and was a long-time member of the South Dakota Humanities Council’s Speaker’s Bureau.

            Norma believes poetry must be heard to be fully appreciated, and that human survival depends on a deep regard for the Earth, humanity and our surrounding cosmos. In 2020 the Center for Western Studies at Augustana University presented her with the Dakota Conference Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of the Northern Plains. That same year she received a Merit Award for her poem “Ms. 2020” that was exhibited in “Ms: Assembled Reformation” March 2-16, 2020, John A. Day Gallery, University of South Dakota.

            In September 2021, Norma participated in a gathering of scientists and artists held at Joy Hollow Girl Scout Camp in Iowa’s Loess Hills. Those who attended were invited to contribute poems, essays or visual art to a book entitled On Common Ground. Norma contributed four poems to this anthology, edited by Ryan Allen and Brian T. Hazlett, and published by Ice Cube Press of North Liberty, Iowa in 2023.              

            Since January 1983, Norma has been living and writing in the geo-solar house she helped Jerry build on a prairie bluff in rural Vermillion. There they raised their son Walter and daughter Laura. With the assistance of their children, neighbors and friends, Norma and Jerry have restored 55 acres of native prairie. They have placed their land in a conservation easement to preserve its forests, springs and prairie as habitat for future generations. This environment where she has lived for forty-one years continues to inspire and nurture Norma C. Wilson’s poetry.

Website:  https://sites.google.com/a/usd.edu/norma-c-wilson/