When he was a year out of high school Lewis Turco began publishing his
poems in the national literary magazines while he was participating in
the World Cruise of the USS Hornet (CVA 12) in 1953. Forty-four books
and more than a half-century later, he is Emeritus Professor of English
Writing Arts, S.U.N.Y Oswego where, in 1968, he founded and for
twenty-eight years directed the Program in Writing Arts. In 1962 he was
founding director also of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
In 1986 his book of criticism Visions and Revisions of American
Poetry published by the University of Arkansas Press, won the Poetry
Society of America's Melville Cane Award, and in 1989 the same
publisher brought out his The Shifting Web: New and Selected Poems.
Recent books are A Book of Fears: Poems winner, with his Italian
translator Joseph Alessia, of the Bordighera Bilingual Poetry Prize;
Shaking the Family Tree: Memoirs both published in 1998 by Bordighera;
The Green Maces of Autumn, Voices in an Old Maine House published by
the Mathom Bookshop in 2002, a sequence of poems two sections of which,
published as A Family Album won the Silverfish Review Chapbook Award
in 1990, and as Murmurs in the Walls won the Cooper House Chapbook
Competition in 1992; The Book of Literary Terms, The Genres of Fiction,
Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship 1999, a Choice
"Outstanding Academic Book" in 2000; two companion volumes The Book of
Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition 2000, known to many since
its original publication in 1968 as "the poet's Bible"; and The Book of
Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays,
Drama, and Poetry 2004, all three published by the University Press of
New England.
Also in 2004 Star Cloud Press issued A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary
Memoirs and The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court -- the
pen-name under which, over many years, he has published many of his
formal poems. The year 2005 will see publication, by the same
publisher, of Fantaseers -- a book of memories about growing up in
Meriden, Connecticut, in the 1950s, and a book of fiction The Museum
of Ordinary People and Other Stories.
