Michigan State University Press author Mark Turcotte was recently named the sixth Illinois poet laureate. Turcotte is the author of Michigan State University Press’s 1998 revised edition of The Feathered Heart.
Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe) spent his earliest years on North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation and in the migrant camps of the western United States. Later, he grew up in and around Lansing, Michigan. After high school, and one unproductive year in college, he traveled the country, working and living on the road for nearly fifteen years.
Arriving in Chicago in the spring of 1993, Turcotte rediscovered his love of words and quickly established himself as a unique voice in the city’s thriving poetry scene. That summer, he was the winner of the first Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award. By year’s end, he had two books of poetry accepted for publication. During his time in Chicago Turcotte was the recipient of a Writer’s Community Residency from National Writer’s Voice and was awarded the 1997 Josephine Gates Kelly Memorial Fellowship from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. He left Chicago for Door County, Wisconsin in 1998.
Turcotte is author of The Feathered Heart (Michigan State University Press, 1998, revised edition); Songs of Our Ancestors (Children’s Press, 1995); a chapbook, Road Noise (Mesilla Press, 1998); Le Chant de la Route et Autres Poèmas (bilingual, Editions la Vague verte, 2001); and Exploding Chippewas (Northwestern University Press, 2002). His work has appeared in many literary journals, including TriQuarterly, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, the Missouri Review, Sentence, North American Review, and Door County Living Magazine, and has been anthologized in several collections, including The Poetry Anthology, 1912–2002; Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Website; Stray Dogs; PowerLines; and What Saves Us. His poem, “The Flower On,” was part of the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural Poetry in Motion project, which placed poetry placards on public transportation in cities across the United States. His fiction and prose work have appeared in several journals, including Rosebud and Hunger Mountain. He is included in When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Light Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. His poem, “Dear New Blood,” was recently featured at Poem-a-Day and on the poetry podcast, Poetry Unbound, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama.
Turcotte received a 2001–2002 Lannan Foundation Literary Completion Grant and won 1999 and 2003 Wisconsin Arts Board Literary Fellowships. He was selected for a National Book Foundation American Voices assignment at Wind River, Wyoming, and a Lannan Writer’s Residency in Marfa, Texas. His work is included in the NEA/Poetry Foundation project Poetry Out Loud.
In 2005, he returned to college, where he completed an MFA in creative writing at Western Michigan University. After graduation, he served as the 2008–2009 visiting Native writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico; was on the faculty of Pine Manor College’s low-res MFA program near Boston; and was visiting writer-in-residence for spring 2014 at the Center for the Writing Arts at Northwestern University. He currently resides in Chicago and, since 2009, has been senior lecturer and distinguished writer-in-residence in the English Department at DePaul University.
