If you’ve ever had a writing class with Professor Mark Turcotte at DePaul, you’re probably familiar with this story. 

He tells it every quarter to his creative writing students: the story of him discovering poetry. A memory seared into his mind that he can relay without skipping a beat. 

A young Turcotte and his Yogi Bear coloring book. Toys and coloring books were hard to come by as Turcotte spent time in North Dakota on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation when he was growing up. The pages were full and he took to drawing around the edges of the colorings; he had to use every bit of the book.

One outline was captioned: “Boys run through the tall grass.” Turcotte took his crayon and began crossing out words to rearrange the sentence. 

“Boys run tall grass.”

“Tall grass run boys.”

That’s when his mother looked over his shoulder, first confused. 

“Why are you scratching the words out?” she asked. “Oh… that kind of sounds like a poem or something.”

Turcotte didn’t even know what a poem was at that age. Regardless, his Yogi Bear coloring book sent him on a long path of discovering, learning and eventually loving poetry. 

Turcotte spent his childhood on the move. 

Born to a white mother and a Native American father of the Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe, Turcotte’s upbringing was split between the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota and Michigan, where his mother was from, and in migrant camps out west. 

Change and choices are something Turcotte sees as integral to his life.

“I like that kind of process of constantly making choices in your life and how that impacts the bigger picture,” Turcotte said. “You might as well adjust to it and face the music that you’re gonna have to make some big choices.” 

One of those choices was Turcotte’s decision to abandon the traditional four-year college route after an unmotivating first year in school. 

Turcotte and his professors butted heads. His Native identity was dismissed. He felt unwelcomed and unhappy.“If I wasn’t riding a horse across the grasslands in my feather bonnet, then I wasn’t Native,” Turcotte said.  

That kicked off another phrase Turcotte’s students are familiar with, his “drunken year” where he “didn’t really accomplish anything.” Turcotte drifted away from the writing scene during a time during which he says he was just beginning to pick up steam in the academic world. 

“I never got a chance to find out,” Turcotte said. “Because I ended up on a whole different trajectory.”

That trajectory — another one of Turcotte’s “pivotal decisions” — landed him working manual labor jobs all across the United States, pulling him further away from academia and writing.

Turcotte went to the world of “working stiffs, guys making their livings with their bodies, not their minds.”  He felt like he belonged, and he did it all over America. 

Turcotte was split between two worlds — an academic one encouraging him to write and another tugging the opposite way. 

But for Turcotte, this is all just part of his story, a lesson he often likes to remind his creative writing and Native literature classes. 

“Stories are all that we are and the stories that we experience, the stories that we’re told, the stories that we live and we’re a part of. … That story forms you.” Turcotte said. 

Born in the “so-called white world” of Lansing, Michigan, Turcotte faced the identity split in ways beyond the literary world. Soon after he was born, he was brought to the reservation with his father. From the reservation to the migrant camps out west to pick plums. Then back to the reservation. Back to Michigan. Reservation. Michigan. 

“There’s a part of it where I felt uprooted, maybe a bit lost,” Turcotte said. He saw the Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe part of his identity being different from the kids around him. 

“They thought it was so strange and alien that they almost thought I was making it up,” Turcotte said. He faced stereotypes and discriminatory questions from his teachers and classmates. His Native identity sometimes was easier to keep hidden to avoid unwanted attention. 

For Turcotte, it added to his story.

Turcotte was reintroduced to — and eventually fully embraced — his Native identity while working on oil exploration projects in West Texas alongside Mexican Americans. Their mannerisms, traditions and jokes remind Turcotte of being on the Reservation as a child. 

“I give that period of my life credit for reintroducing me to that thing in me that was eating at me all the time, that I was trying to ignore, to be the Native person that I was,” Turcotte said. 

Writing was still there for Turcotte even through oil explorations and manual labor jobs. Chicago was also there — the “Emerald City” — shimmering with the “literally pulsing” literary glow of the 1990s. 

Turcotte was whisked to poetry open mics at the famous Green Mill lounge and Wicker Park’s former haunt the HotHouse, all while renovating his former high school English teacher’s basement apartment on West Belmont Avenue. 

Turcotte was a natural at reciting his poetry. This is something that struck DePaul English department professor and chair Miles Harvey. 

One of his earliest memories with Turcotte is when the two were slated back-to-back at a reading. 

“Anyone who’s ever read after Mark knows it’s a dangerous thing to be,” Harvey said. “He’s such a wonderful reader on top of being just a superb and nuanced poet. … He’s got this booming baritone voice. … Mark reads with gusto.”

Turcotte has also shared Chicago’s open mic scene with his students, encouraging them to bring their own work onto the stage. 

Emily Mayo, a former DePaul student of Turcotte’s, credits him for bringing her into the Chicago literary scene and being a “mentor and friend.”

“Professor Turcotte’s interest and respect for my work gave me the courage and motivation to submit to literary magazines and attend open mics in the city,” Mayo said. “Professor Turcotte is a true literary citizen. … His invitations brought me to parts of the city I’d never been or heard of as an out-of-state student.”

Turcotte won the first ever Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award in 1993. In spring 2025, Turcotte was named the sixth Illinois Poet Laureate, an honorary state position to promote access to the arts and foster literary engagement. 

After finding his path back to school later in life to get his MFA, Turcotte took a left off the highway in Texarkana, Arkansas, to go interview for a teaching position at DePaul, where he later accepted the position “somewhere in Southern Ohio.”

“It was pretty miraculous,” Turcotte said. “I don’t know if a lot of English departments across America would have been so welcoming.”

Turcotte is the type of professor who brings Pop-Tarts to class because someone mentioned them last week, or orders Pequod’s for the last day of school. He takes his students to the Green Mill, which still holds poetry open mics once a month. He listens; he empathizes. 

Mayo remembers a conversation she had with Turcotte “some days after graduation,” where she was facing anxiety about “all that change that was hurling” at her.

“My conversation with Mark was exactly what I needed,” Mayo said. “It was so human, it reminded me I was human too.”

The honor that lies in Turcotte’s Poet Laureate title brings DePaul, the English Department and Harvey himself great pride.

“I started giggling with joy when he gave me a little advance notice,” Harvey said. “He’ll take it and run with it, and he’ll do it as he does everything, in his own unique and thoughtful and impassioned way.”

Turcotte’s praises aren’t lacking, from students and faculty alike. 

“Professor Turcotte is a brilliant poet and a highly thoughtful, generous and kind person that would hate all of this because he is way humbler than he has any reason to be,” Mayo said.

For Mark Turcotte, Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe, poet, former sheetrock hanger, plum picker, oil exploration worker and teacher, being named the 6th Illinois is another part of his story, another decision on his path that forms him. 

“Storytelling is what happens outside the poems,” Turcotte said.

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