Norma Bradley

Multi Media Artist

The natural world provides inspiration and endless symbolic meanings. There are moments in the day when the falling of a leaf, or a tree before me glows with its unique markings, colors and rhythm. At other moments a memory of a place, person or experience reveals itself. It is those moments that seem to infuse my work and bring a spiritual meaning to the process.

Allowing the process to unfold, I work intuitively, as I combine mediums. Natural materials, fiber, photographs and words merge as new ideas blossom into a new form. The desire to explore, create and enter a mysterious place of possibility is the motivation for each new piece.

It is through public installations, teaching and writing that I share my passion, address social, political, environmental and aesthetic concerns. It is my desire to affect change in positive ways.

Ghosts Rip Free

Ghosts Rip Free book cover.

Ghosts Rip Free, by Norma Bradley, is such a lovingly imagined book. It’s no accident that Bradley, in addition to being a virtuoso poet, is a virtuoso quilter. She writes exquisitely about, and out of, memory: the often-precarious art of arranging, then stitching together, remnants, swatches, ephemera, what’s been lost or forgotten, to create a stunning composite cosmos that the fragments lack – a pattern wrought of improvisation and intuition at once. What’s more, these poems, like a quilt, function as a genealogy, the plat and locus of the heart – over time, terrain, and ancestral devotion. Bradley has fashioned in this volume a praise-song to family and the willed act of memory, joined to language, that resurrects it.

Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) & author of Land of Amnesia

To purchase Norma's chapbook please contact her at