MARK TURCOTTE (Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe) is the 6th Illinois Poet Laureate. He 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.
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 winner of the First Gwendolyn Brooks Open-mic Poetry Award.
Turcotte is author of
The Feathered Heart,
Songs of Our Ancestors,
Road Noise,
Le Chant de la Route, and
Exploding Chippewas (Northwestern University Press). His work has appeared in many national and international literary journals and is included in the new and first ever
Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. Turcotte was the recipient of a 2001-2002 Lannan Foundation Literary Completion Grant.
In 2008 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. He again lives in Chicago and, since 2009, has been Senior Lecturer and Distinguished-Writer-In-Residence in the English Dept at DePaul University.