Bio

Nick Norwood is a professor of creative writing at Columbus State University, the interim chair of the Department of Art, and the director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia, and Nyack, New York. His poems have appeared widely in a number of national and international literary journals, online sites, and public broadcasts—The Paris Review, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, Pleiades, Ekphrasis, Poetry Daily, The New Ohio Review, Five Points, The Oxford American, The Greensboro Review, The South Carolina Review, New South, storySouth, Atlanta Review, This Land, the PBS NewsHour site Art Beat, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated column American Life in Poetry, on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, Poetry Ireland's Vital Signs: Poems of Illness and Healing, and many others.

Nick has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an International Merit Award in Poetry from Atlanta Review, a residency at the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming, both a Tennessee Williams Scholarship and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, twice been a finalist for the Vassar Miller Prize, once each a semifinalist for the Verse Prize and the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, and a finalist in both the Morton Marr Poetry Contest and the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry. His first book, The Soft Blare, selected by Andrew Hudgins for the River City Poetry Series, was issued in 2003. His second, A Palace for the Heart, winner of second prize in the Mellen Press Poetry Contest, was published by that press in 2004. In 2007, he published a limited edition, fine press book, Wrestle, in collaboration with the artist and master printer Erika Adams. In 2016, he and Erika produced a second book, Text. Nick’s third full volume of poems, Gravel and Hawk, won the Hollis Summers Prize in Poetry and was published by Ohio University Press in 2012. His fourth, Eagle & Phenix, came out in spring 2019.

Nick has also published a number of essays, reviews, book chapters, and critical studies of poetry. In March 2016 his article on “Tone and the International Style” in the work of the Northern Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney appeared in the international Irish studies journal Estudios Irlandeses, published at the University of Barcelona. "Mark Strand on the Moon" was the featured essay in the Fall 2020 issue of Birmingham Poetry Review. Nick’s essay "On Poetry's Pure Serene" appeared in the October 2021 issue of Literary Matters. His profile of Carson McCullers appeared in Argentina’s online literary magazine Ulrica Revista in April of 2021.

In addition to Nick’s collaborations with Erika Adams, he has also worked with sculptor Mike McFalls, who created a permanent public art installation featuring Nick’s poem "powerhouse," mounted in twelve-inch corten steel on the RiverWalk in Columbus, Georgia, in 2016. For “Port Futures and Social Logistics: A virtual research summit and online exhibition of works” at the Lamar Dodd School of Art and College of Environment + Design at the University of Georgia, Nick Norwood and Mike McFalls, along with sound designer Ian Dooley, collaborated to produce “After the Last,” a short film featuring Nick’s poem of the same name, Mike’s drone footage, and Ian’s sound effects and background music. Nick collaborated with Matthew McCabe and James Ogburn on a sound recording of his poem "Firewood," and James used Nick’s poem "Tongue and Groove" as the libretto of an operetta that premiered at the Puccini Chamber Opera Festival in Lucca, Italy, on 12 June 2021. Mike McFalls and photographer Rylan Steele, curators of “Looking Male,” an art photography exhibition at the La Grange Art Museum, La Grange, GA (February 5 - April 3, 2021) and the Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, GA (October - December, 2021) commissioned Nick’s poems "Mine" and "Gulf" for inclusion in the exhibition. And Nick’s poem "The Southern Forest" is featured in photographer Chuck Hemard's art photography book The Pines: Southern Forests. 

Nick has been the sole poet representing the United States at the Euroscience Open Forum’s session “Science Meets Poetry” on four separate occasions—in Munich in 2006, Turin in 2010, Copenhagen in 2014, and Manchester, UK, in 2016. He served as the co-director of the EC-Ireland study abroad program from 2013-2015, as site director of CSU’s Spencer House in Oxford, England—where he was also a visiting fellow at Greyfriar's Hall—in spring of 2008, and he has taught in or directed study abroad and study away programs in Oxford, Swäbisch Gmünd, Germany, and New York City. 

Since 2015 Nick has served as director of the Carson McCullers Center. Among the Center’s many programs is the podcast The Carson McCullers Center's Weekly We of Me, for which Nick is the host. The Center’s current "big project" is the first-ever documentary film on Carson McCullers.