She graduated from Goddard College, and moved from Vermont to the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Norman and Shore lived in Cambridge, New Jersey, Oahu, and Vermont, before settling into homes in Chevy Chase, Maryland near Washington, D.C. during the school year, and East Calais, Vermont[5] in the summertime.
[6][7] Their friend, the author David Mamet and Shore's Goddard College classmate, lives nearby.
[8] During the summer of 2003, poet Reetika Vazirani was housesitting the Normans' Chevy Chase home.
[9][10][11] She has edited Ploughshares,[12] and her poems have been published in numerous magazines, including Poetry, The New Republic, and The Yale Review She was Radcliffe Institute, fellow in poetry, 1971–73, and Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in English at Harvard University, 1973—, and Jenny McKean Moore Writer at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She was visiting distinguished poet at the University of Hawaii.