BRIAN TURNER
BOOKS:
©Kim Buchheit
"I am a drone aircraft plying the darkness above my body, flying over my wife as she sleeps beside me, over the curvature of the earth, over the glens of Antrim and the Dalmatian coastline, the shells of Dubrovnik and Brcko and Mosul arcing in the air beside me, projectiles filled with poems and death and love." - My Life as a Foreign Country
Brian Turner is the author of two poetry collections, Here, Bullet which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection, the 2006 PEN Center USA “Best in the West” award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others; and Phantom Noise, which was shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry. He is also the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, which was a New York Times "Editor's Choice" selection, and made Powell’s Best Nonfiction of 2014 list. Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division.
He directs the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and serves as a contributing editor at The Normal School. Brian is married to Ilyse Kusnetz (poet and author of Small Hours from Truman State University Press). They live in Florida.
In his poetry and prose, Turner conveys both elegant and devastating portraits of what it means to be a a human being.
For more info: http://www.brianturner.org
VIDEOS
Turner in the Academy Award Nominated Operation Homecoming. (Starts at 1min7secs)
Florence Welsh talking about Turner's poetry on the BBC (Starts at 4min30secs)