My name is Norman Minnick, and I serve as the Director of Writing and Community in the English Department. I am a poet, editor, and graphic designer, and have worked in higher education for 25 years. My teaching focuses on how writing, literature, and the humanities can make us more fully human and are vital to a liberal arts education.
Courses taught at Marian:
• ENG 401: Publishing and Print Culture
• ENG 380: Literature: “Spinning Straw into Gold: Finding Ourselves in Myth and Story”
• ENG 319: Mythology
• ENG 309: Advanced Editorial Experience/Student Publications
• ENG 239: Professional Writing
• ENG 213: Literature: The Short Story
• ENG 204: Intro to Creative Genres
• ENG 115: Written Analysis of Literature
• ENG 112: Writing and Community
• FYS 110: First-Year Seminar
• GLS 220: Global Humanities
• COL 110: Strategies for College and Career Success
• COL 099: College Reading and Learning Strategies
I am the author of four books of poetry. My poems have been published in nearly 100 literary journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, and Sweden. My essays have appeared in several literary and peer-reviewed academic journals, including Teachers & Writers Magazine, World Literature Today, The Georgia Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Poetry International, and Notre Dame Review.
My scholarship and editorial work on the Black Arts Movement poet Etheridge Knight includes We Rode the Rhythms as One: On the Poetry of Etheridge Knight (University of Michigan Press), a second volume, So My Soul Can Sing, forthcoming in Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series, and The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight, which was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
I attended Marian as an undergraduate student, where I majored in Art and English. I was also a member of the cycling team and editor of the student-run newspaper The Carbon and the literary journal, The Fioretti. My graduate studies resulted in an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University.
Books Authored:
• Cabbage and Whiskey. Kinchafoonee Creek Press, Athens (2025)
• Advice for a Young Poet (chapbook). David Roberts Books, Cincinnati (2020)
• Folly. Wind Publications, Nicholasville, Kentucky (2013)
• To Taste the Water. Mid-List Press, First Series Award for Poetry, Minneapolis (2007)
Books Edited:
• Etheridge Knight: So My Soul Can Sing, University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry Series (Forthcoming).
• We Rode the Rhythms as One: On the Poetry of Etheridge Knight, University of Michigan Press Under Discussion Series, Ann Arbor (2026).
• Elizabetheridge and the Necessity of Motion: A Memoir in Poetry by Elizabeth McKim, Kinchafoonee Creek Press, Athens (2023)
• The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight, Kinchafoonee Creek Press, Athens (2022)
• Books of Love (Libros de Amor) by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Kinchafoonee Creek Press, Athens (2021)
• The Indianapolis Anthology, Belt Publishing, Cleveland (2021)
• Work toward Knowing: Beginning with Blake by Jim Watt. Kinchafoonee Creek Press, Athens (2016)
• Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century. White Pine Press, Buffalo (2010)
