This is a pioneering study of the life and work of the Welsh-born poet and short-story writer Leslie Norris. His life, from his Merthyr upbringing to lecturing in England to a distinguished university career in the USA, is examined in connection with his development as a writer. In his early days much influenced by Dylan Thomas, Wordsworth and others, he later found his own literary voice in beautifully crafted stories and poems and, in more recent years, spare, compressed poem-sequences which speak of the modern world with piercing and, at times, pessimistic force. This account corrects the mistaken perception of Norris as a misplaced Georgian and shows him to be a moving, complex, disconcerning and important modern writer.

Colonel Leslie R. Groves was a career officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, fresh from over-seeing hundreds of military construction projects, including the Pentagon, when he was given the job in September 1942 of building the atomic bomb. In this full-scale biography, Norris places Groves at the centre of the amazing Manhattan Project story. Offering new information and vital insights into how the bomb got built and how the decision to use it was made, this is a completely new perspective on the military colossus behind the U.S.'s first nuclear bombs.

A collection of poems about such everyday events as buying a puppy, playing football, and collecting frogs.

An award-winning novel following two Black adolescents as they come of age in two vastly different neighborhoods of the same Southern California city. Winner of the 2012 James D. Houston Award, Keenan Norris’s first novel is a beautiful, gritty, coming-of-age tale about two young African Americans in the San Bernardino Valley—a story of exceptional power, lyricism, and depth. Erycha and Touissant live only a few miles apart in the city of Highland, but their worlds are starkly separated by the lines of class, violence, and history. In alternating chapters that touch and intertwine only briefly, Brother and the Dancer follows their adolescence and young adulthood on two sides of the city, the luminous San Bernardino range casting its hot shade over their separate tales in an unflinching vision of Black life in Southern California. Praise for Brother and the Dancer “Read Keenan Norris, an important new American writer. His Brother and the Dancer delivers everything we want from a first novel: a story we’ve never read before, a world we’ve never quite known, a vision we’re unfamiliar with. And yet it gives us the prose of a mature artist, and an understanding of the human heart that would seem nearly impossible in a writer so young. A fine and daring book.” —Andrew Winer, author of The Marriage Artist “American Letters has a bright, stirring and brilliant new voice.” —Micheline Aharonian Marcom, author of The Mirror in the Well “Keenan Norris is simply one of the most talented young writers around. Brother and the Dancer is his brilliantly realized debut. The story of Touissant and Erycha, their families, their homes, is somehow tender and unflinching, filled with insight and hard-earned wisdom—all of it written with a memorable richness.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver

His poetry seeks to transcend the limits of earthbound Man and allies itself with the greater cyclical processes of nature. This is his tenth volume of poetry.