Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient Lewis Turco

Turco is most notably known for championing Formalist poetry, or New Formalism, in the United States.

Turco is Emeritus Professor of English and past Director of the Program in Writing Arts at the State University of New York (SUNY), College at Oswego. He is a prolific award-winning author who has published 21 collections of his own poems and a book of literary criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry (1986). His poetry, fiction, drama, and essays have appeared in most literary magazines, and in over 100 books, most recently in Washburn and Major's World Poetry.

Lewis Turco was born in Buffalo, New York on May 2, 1934. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Connecticut in 1959 and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1962.

Turco taught at Fenn College (later Cleveland State University) where he founded the Cleveland Poetry Center, of which he was the director until 1964. He later served as assistant professor at Hillsdale College.

From 1965 through 1996, Turco taught at SUNY-Oswego, where he also was Poet-in-Residence from 1995 until his retirement in 1996. At SUNY-Oswego Turco founded and directed the Program in the Writing Arts.

Turco began his publishing career in 1960, with the publication of First Poems. Sometimes using the pseudonym Wesli Court (an anagram of Lewis Turco), he has continued to publish poetry, books about poetry, such as the New Book of Forms and Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, and other works related to the writing arts.

Turco has collaborated with other artists on such projects as While the Spider Slept, a ballet based upon his poem November 22, 1963, performed by the Swedish Ballet and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet; The Fog, a chamber opera with Dutch composer Walter Hekster; and Bordello: PoemPrints with printmaker George O'Connell.

He is retired from University teaching and from operating an antiquarian bookshop in southern Maine.