Illinois Poet Laureate Mark Turcotte

About Mark Turcotte

Writer Mark 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 writing 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 being prepared for publication, and soon thereafter, he was selected by Ms. Brooks as a Significant Illinois Poet and was named to the Illinois Authors Poster.  During his time in Chicago, Turcotte was also 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 with his new wife and son 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 (bilingual, La Vague Verte, Paris, 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, 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 the new and first ever Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, entitled When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Light Came Through. His poem, “Dear New Blood,” was recently featured at Poem-A-Day and on the poetry podcast, Poetry Unbound, hosted by Pådraig Ó Tuama.

Turcotte was the recipient of a 2001-2002 Lannan Foundation Literary Award and was awarded 1999 and 2003 Literary Fellowships by the Wisconsin Arts Board.  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 The Solstice low-res MFA Program, now at Lasell University near Boston; and was Visiting Writer-In-Residence for Spring 2014 at the Center For The Writing Arts at Northwestern University.  He returned to Chicago in 2009 to serve as Senior Lecturer and Distinguished-Writer-In-Residence in the English Department at DePaul University. He lives with his wife, Susan, only steps away from Lake Michigan in the Rogers Park neighborhood.