Lewis Turco

Star Cloud Press of Scottsdale, Arizona, will publish two books by poet Lewis Turco of Dresden, Maine, during 2004, plus a festschrift volume to celebrate his 70th birthday on May second.

The first book by Mr. Turco, published in May, is titled A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs which cover the poet's career of half a century, from 1953 when he published his first poem in a national literary periodical, to the present.

The second book is The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco/Wesli Court. Wesli Court is an anagram pen-name under which Mr. Turco has published most of his traditionally rhymed and metered poems since his First Poems in 1960. They are basic to the current revival of interest in American traditional poetry which is called The New Formalism. This book will be published on June 12th at the West Chester University Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania where Prof. Turco will give a reading and be recognized with a panel on his life and work. Panelists will include the poet R. S. Gwynn and the publisher of Star Cloud, Dr. Steven E. Swerdfeger, who is also editing the as-yet-untitled festschrift volume which will appear at the same time.

In February Mr. Turco also published The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, the third in a series of books on the writing arts that he has written including the Bible of the neo-formalist movement, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition (2000), and The Book of Literary Terms, The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship (1999) which was cited by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for the year 2000. The publisher of all three of these latter books is the University Press of New England (37 Lafayette Street, Lebanon, NH 03766).

Lewis Turco is the founding director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and of the Program in Writing Arts at Oswego State University in New York, which he administered from 1968 to 1995. Including the titles cited above, Dr. Turco is the author of 44 books, monographs, and chapbooks. His poetry, fiction, plays, nonfiction, and criticism have appeared in most of the major literary periodicals of the past half-century and in over 100 books and anthologies.