[3] Upon her arrival to the Bay Area, Cole got a job in the public school system, but it was through her association with New College of California that she met her core community of poets, including Robert Duncan, Michael Palmer, David Levi Strauss, Susan Thackrey, Aaron Shurin, and Laura Moriarty.
Important French connections have included Claude Royet-Journoud, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Joseph Simas, who published her first book, Mace Hill Remap.
"The Poetics of Vertigo" — delivered as the 1998 "George Oppen Memorial Lecture" for The Poetry Center, SFSU — won the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award.
Norma Cole's work has received great acclaim for her: "openness to traditions and practices, artists and writings, radically divergent from her own".
There she helped to create a site-specific gallery installation titled Collective Memory which opened on December 11, 2004 and ran through April 16, 2005.