Norita Dittberner-Jax grew up in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul, amid a lively mix of German, Irish, and Polish neighbors. That early blending of ethnic cultures struggling for footing in the middle-class influenced her later work as a teacher and a writer. Her family was large, musical, and politically articulate. She grew up with a firm grounding in the real world and a strong desire to be part of a larger community, two themes important to her poetry. She studied literature and education at what is now Saint Catherine’s University. She was a teacher of young children, an urban high school English teacher, and a teaching writer for COMPAS. It was only after she finished teaching full-time and had published three collections of poetry that she entered the MFA program at Hamline University. The extensive travel that she and her husband, Eugene Jax, did was a rich resource for her writing until his diagnosis of ALS.

Norita won the Midwest Book Award in poetry in 2018 for Crossing the Waters (Nodin Press). Her work has been recognized by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Loft Mentor Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Now I Live Among Old Trees is her sixth collection of poetry.