A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs

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 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. His most recent books are A Book of Fears: Poems, winner, with his Italian translator Joseph Alessia, of the Bordighera Bilingual Poetry Prize; his first book of memoirs, Shaking the Family Tree: A Remembrance, both published in 1998 by Bordighera; 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 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. His most recent collection of poetry, The Green Maces of Autumn, Voices in an Old Maine House, published by the Mathom Bookshop in 2002, is 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.