One of this year’s highlights in the Department of English was the appointment of Prof. Mark Turcotte as the new Illinois Poet Laureate. Turcotte, a distinguished writer in residence at DePaul, is the sixth person ever to be named to this prestigious post, joining such luminaries as Carl Sandburg (who served from 1962 to 1967), Gwendolyn Brooks (1968-2000) and Angela Jackson (2000-2024). He began a four-year term on July 1, 2025.
A member of the Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe, Turcotte spent his earliest years on North Dakota's Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation and in the migrant camps of the western United States. Before joining the DePaul faculty in 2009, he worked in various blue-collar professions, including oil exploration, construction and truck-driving.
Miles Harvey, the chair of English and a fellow member of the creative-writing faculty, interviewed Prof. Turcotte about his unconventional path to success.
On the day of your official appointment as Poet Laureate of Illinois, you told a funny story about you and two previous other poet Laureates—one that speaks to the incredible journey you’ve traveled.
Yeah, when my wife Susan and I were driving down to Springfield for the Poet Laureate announcement, I suddenly said, “Wow, I think I have a memory of being in the same green room with Gwendolyn Brooks and Angela Jackson.” But I couldn’t remember when or where it happened. I mean, I read with Angela a couple of times, and I knew Gwendolyn back in the 1990s. There's no way in the world I've ever claimed that Gwendolyn and I were friends, because that would be presumptuous of me. But she was really kind to me.
I think this incident in which all three of us were in the same room might have taken place at the Chicago Historical Society, because I did work there for a while. What I remember is that the people who were in charge asked me, since I knew Gwendolyn, if I would go back there and just make sure that she and Angela were comfortable, kind of just make sure they got water and stuff. And I said, “Yeah, I can do that.”
So at that time, my role as junior poet ended up being a water-boy for the big poets.
How does it feel to be joining these people you’ve looked up to for so long?
I'm just completely surprised. I keep saying, “How did I get here? What weird set of circumstances got me to this place?” And sometimes I even grudgingly start to say, “Well, maybe it’s not that weird. Maybe I am interesting and unusual.” But I also grew up with this mother whose favorite phrase was, “Don't get on your high horse,” so thinking myself worthy doesn’t come naturally. But she was raised that way, too.
You know, my mom quit school in the sixth grade as a Michigan farm girl—and by the time it came around to me, she was a single mother with two young children and had really terrible men that she could never depend on, men who were brutal to her. She eventually got us out of those situations, the predicaments that she had gotten us into. But there's one thing I'm always sure of—that my mother loved me dearly and that I loved my mother dearly, despite how imperfect a parent she sometimes was. My mother also had a lot of trust in me, which my friends envied because their parents never trusted them. Not that she had any reason to trust me, because I was doing all the things that, you know, young boys often do.
Did you always know you were going to be a creative person?
I often tell my students that I've pretty much known I wanted to be a writer since I learned how to read. As soon as I learned to read, I immediately started composing. You know what I mean? For instance, one of my pivotal moments that enters my writing all the time is being a very little kid in a migrant camp in Idaho, where my mother and my stepfather earned money by picking potatoes. I was quite young so I mostly played in the fields. But my sister, she helped out because she was five years older than me.
On this occasion, I remember looking up at a Mexican tractor driver, watching him drink a bottle of orange soda pop with the sun behind him and the bright orange soda pop in his black fingers and his face with a gold tooth and a couple missing teeth. There are lots of people who might look up and see that, and they wouldn’t see a dark angel sitting on a tractor drinking the sun. But that's what I saw. I've written about that moment in at least one poem, and it’s a large moment in a short story that I wrote. So when people ask, “How do you end up an artist?” Well, I say, “That's how you end up an artist.”
I’m guessing that not many poet laureates in this country have lived in migrant-worker camps. How does your very non-traditional journey into academia and the world of letters inform your teaching and your mentorship of students?
One of the things it does is to keep me humble. Even when I try to act academic or say something scholarly, you know, I just can't do it. I can't take myself seriously. So I think it’s helpful to give students a little background on myself and my path. Over the course of a quarter, I try to remind all of us in the room of how important our origins are in shaping us. They don't entirely define us, but they certainly do flavor us.
For instance, one of my early experiences at DePaul was that I was in a classroom with a student who was struggling and late all the time. In class, they really participated, and they were amazing. And then they would do an overnight assignment, and their work didn't make sense. I was like, “This writing cannot be from that same person.” And then I found out that they were living in a car with their mother, trying to avoid some violent father figure or something. And I was like, “God, no wonder this student is better in the classroom.” That was a real slap in the face for me—a reminder that everybody in the room has something going on. They have a story. And because I got to where I am now by taking a different path, I try to keep in mind that other people have different paths, too.
On the subject of paths, what do you say to young people who want to follow their passions, either as a creative writer or as a literary-studies major, but who can't see their way through into a future career. What sort of wisdom do you have for them?
The first thing I say to them is, “Even if you think you're never going to write a book or don't really care if you become a poet or whatever, learning how to write well in a creative way, in an interesting way, will help you get a job that has nothing to do with writing. So just consider the writing we do in this class as practice for being a better speaker and communicator in your life. Among other things, you’ll make friends with more interesting people.”
I think every job I've gotten, every friend I've made, even winding up with the amazing life partner that I have, all has to do with me being able to express myself.
I want to close by just asking you what your agenda is for the next four years. What do you hope to accomplish as Illinois Poet Laureate?
Being at DePaul, I've learned that even when I sometimes just don't care about being a writer myself, I always care about the young writers who are in my classrooms. They keep me juiced up. So one of my little fantasies is to carry that feeling, that idea, with me when I’m doing an official Poet Laureate event. I don't want to be the only person reading. I want to include other writers. If I do an event in Carbondale, for example, I’d like to find maybe an adult writer and a young person who could share the stage with me that night. I’d hope that sort of inclusion would help bring in an audience from the area. If a local person’s kid was reading or their cousin was reading or their neighbor was reading, then they might be more inclined to come out, too.
Another part of the agenda is to just be out there to help people see the importance of poetry, and other forms of expression, in their children's lives, because we're in a place right now in America where it seems like more and more people are willing to believe that investing in the arts is a waste of money. So I hope to fight back against that. But the biggest part of the job is to kind of be an ambassador for poetry, maybe an introducer, which I look forward to because of how much I care about this stuff. I just really love it.