Lissette   J. Norman

          My children's book is available in bookstores everywhere!

                               My Feet Are Laughing           

                                                   (click on link above)

artist's biographical resume

 (an excerpt)

how i came to love reading

When I was 12 and my brother Johnny was 16, he left his book,

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, lying around and I picked it up.

It was the first time characters in a book looked like the people in my neighborhood.

I couldn't put the book down. After that, I read all the books I could find.

i always had a thing with words

I grew up in two worlds, raised by an immigrant mother on American soil.  

I ran around New York City streets with a set of Spanish words and another set of English ones.

I learned to navigate between both worlds

by mixing and playing with words from a young age.

poetry really chose me
My brother Henry was the first one in our family to go to college.

I changed my mind about joining the military after high school because I wanted

to experience the same freedom as the poets in Henry's college newspaper.   
I immediately caught on that there was an absence of boundaries in writing—

And  it was on!

The idea that one could say, in poetry, whatever she is thinking was liberating

to a young woman who had been taught to be seen and not heard.  

By the time I got to college, silence had almost killed me.

So you could say that poetry came just at the right time and saved my life.

writing is the broom of my soul
Poems are extracted from a passion that keeps demanding more from me,

from my struggles with spirit, from evolution that is not always graceful,

and I'm also lucky with inspiration.

Writing is about trying. And about faith, ultimately.

I am still turning my art over.

I suppose the meaning of my art becomes ashes and then fire again with time and examination.

The more I write and trust my inner impulses, the more certain the meaning becomes.  

For now, all  that seems to be holding true is...

if I write from my corazon, my world won't fall.