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Nora Gallagher
Author and Editor
Santa Barbara, CA

Nora Gallagher's best-selling memoir, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, received outstanding reviews. Her essays, book reviews, and journalism have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, DoubleTake, Time, the Los Angeles Times Magazines, The Village Voice, and Mother Jones. She is also the editor of the award-winning Patagonia: Notes from the Field, a collection of literary essays on the outdoors.

After college (St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico) Ms. Gallagher worked as a free-lance magazine journalist in San Francisco. She was the lead stringer for Time's West Coast bureau. The seventies in San Francisco provided a rich ground for someone learning to be a reporter: she covered the Hearst and Dan White trials in the city, the so-called gay riots, and the beginning of what would become the AIDS crisis.

In the early eighties she published an article in Mother Jones about AIDS and what dividing people into healthy and unhealthy sexual partners might mean to us morally, a step toward combining essay
and reporting. A later essay on money, baby boomers and ambivalence, published in the Santa Barbara weekly paper The Independent, was reprinted in the Utne Reader and elsewhere.

Wary of sentimentalizing or over-generalizing her middle-class life, she started looking for ideas farther abroad. In the late eighties, she visited Nicaragua, and wrote about the daily lives of people
in the waning days of the Sandinista Revolution, then went on to Czechoslovakia, shortly after the Velvet Revolution where she wrote an article about the effect on families of the atmosphere created
by the secret police and another on a newly elected member of parliament accused of collaboration. Ms. Gallagher is particularly
interested in what happens to ordinary people in the shadow of larger events. She and her husband live in Santa Barbara, CA.

Practicing Resurrection - Introduction and excerpt from Nora Gallagher's book, Practicing Resurrection, a compelling story of a woman at a crossroads.