Kenneth Wayne Norris (born April 3, 1951)[1] is a poet, editor and professor of Canadian literature, retired from the University of Maine.
[2] He was born in New York City to Leroy and Theresa Norris,[1] attended Stony Brook University for his BA from 1968-1972, and then moved to Montreal to pursue his MA in English at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University).
He “was tired of being an anti-American American in the Nixon era, and coming to Quebec (and Canada) gave [him] a positive agenda, gave [him] something positive to be.”[4] After his graduation in 1975, he spent two years in New York before returning to Montreal for his PhD in English at McGill University, supervised by Louis Dudek, who in 1992 described Norris as "the most important poet writing on the North American continent today".
[5] He became particularly interested in Canadian modernist literature, with his thesis entitled “The Role of the Little Magazine in the Development of Modernist and Post-Modernism in Canadian Poetry”.
[7] After the dissolution of CrossCountry due to lack of funds, Norris become the McGill-Writer-In-Residence 1983-1984.