Good morning, everyone! We have a couple of announcements for today.
Good morning, everyone! We have lots of announcements for today.
First, some tremendous news: a huge congratulations to our very own Prof. Mark Turcotte, who has just been named by Governor JB Pritzker, the Illinois Arts Council (IAC), Illinois Humanities, and the Poetry Foundation as the sixth (and newest) Illinois Poet Laureate!
As Governor Pritzker observes in his press release, “Mark Turcotte’s work reflects the complex and beautiful landscape of both our state and the country as a whole through his unique perspective as a Native writer who has lived across the US but has found a home here in Illinois.”
Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton adds that “Illinois has a long tradition of supporting the work of artists and in these uncertain times, we often look to art to bridge divides and renew our shared sense of humanity . . . I look forward to the ways Mark’s poetry will create space for reflection, inspire hope, and draw us closer to one another.” (Click here to read the full press release.)
(Scroll to the bottom of the post for a bio on Prof. Turcotte and his accomplishments, as well as a link to his Newsline interview with Max Dickstein. Click here to see Prof. Turcotte featured in the Chicago Tribune!)
Coming up this Monday, May 5: join us and the Department of Irish Studies for an evening with Prof. Frank Shovlin, who will be discussing his writing process and his work on a biography of John McGahern, one of Ireland’s leading writers in the 20th century. Prof. Shovlin teaches at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, and has published widely on an array of Irish literary topics, including books on twentieth-century magazine culture and James Joyce, in addition to McGahern. This year, he is M.H. Abrams Visiting Research Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, where he is completing work on McGahern’s authorized biography, forthcoming in 2026. This event will be held in ALH 412 from 5:00 to 6:00 PM. Read the flier below for full details!
For today’s deadlines, this is your reminder that submissions to Dragon Bone Journal, The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, and the Ninth Letter Literary Awards are all due tonight. (Click on each for more details.)
About Prof. Mark Turcotte:
Writer Mark Turcotte 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 finishing school he traveled the country, working and living on the road for nearly fifteen years.
Arriving in Chicago in the spring of 1993 Turcotte rediscovered a love of words, began writing again, and quickly established himself as a unique voice in the city’s thriving poetry scene. That summer he was winner of the First Gwendolyn Brooks Open-mic Poetry Award. By years-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.
Turcotte is author of The Feathered Heart (Michigan State University Press, revised, 1998), Songs of Our Ancestors (Children’s Press, 1995), a chapbook,Road Noise (Mesilla Press, 1998), and Le Chant de la Route (bilingual, La Vague Verte, 2001). His collection, Exploding Chippewas (Northwestern University Press, 2002), is in its fourth printing. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in many literary journals, including TriQuarterly, POETRY, Hunger Mountain, Rosebud, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares,Sentence and The Missouri Review, and has been anthologized in The POETRY Anthology, 1912-2002, Smokestacks & Skyscrapers: An Anthology of Chicago Writing, and Poetry Daily:366 among other collections. His poem, The Flower On, was part of the Poetry Society of America’s Poetry In Motionproject, which placed poetry placards on public transportation in cities across the United States. His work is included in the NEA/Poetry Foundation high school recitation project Poetry Out Loud.
Turcotte was awarded 1999 and 2003 Literary Fellowships by the Wisconsin Arts Board, and he was the recipient of a 2001-2002 Lannan Foundation Literary Completion Grant. In 2004 he completed a National Book Foundation AmericanVoices assignment at Wind River, Wyoming, and a Lannan Writer’s Residency in Marfa, Texas.
After receiving an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University, Turcotte served as the 2008-2009 Visiting Native Writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and has now returned to Chicago where he teaches Creative Writing as Visiting Assistant Professor in English at DePaul University.
(Click here to read an interview with Mark Turcotte in DePaul’s Newsline.)
