Lewis Turco

Lewis Turco was born in Buffalo, New York, and earned a BA at the University of Connecticut and an MA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poetry collections include The Airs of Wales (1981), The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House (2002), The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco/Wesli Court, 1953–2004 (2004), Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959–2007 (2007), and The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems (2010). His work has been featured in many anthologies, including Patterns of Poetry (1986) and An Exaltation of Forms (2002). Turco is best known for his exhaustive handbook The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (1986, fourth edition, 2011). His Visions and Revisions of American Poetry (1986) won the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award for Criticism. He is also the author of the children’s book Murgatroyd and Mabel (1978, illustrated by Robert Michaels) and La Famiglia/The Family: Memoirs (2009).
 
Turco was the founding director of the Poetry Center at Fenn College (now Cleveland State University). He also founded the Program in Writing Arts at SUNY Oswego, where he taught for 30 years before retiring in 1996. His honors include the Bordighera Poetry Prize, an honorary doctorate from Ashland University, and the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Lewis died at the age of ninety on September 25, 2024.