Brian Turner

Brian Turner is the author of two collections of poetry: Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005; Bloodaxe Books, 2007) and Phantom Noise (Alice James Books, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, 2010). Both collections were published in Swedish by Oppenheim Publishing in 2011. Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000). His poetry and essays have been published in Poetry Daily, The New York Times, The Georgia Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. Turner was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. He received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Phantom Noise, was short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Prize. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others. He is the director of the new low residency MFA program in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe. His memoir, My Life As a Foreign Country, was published by W.W. Norton in September 2014, and he is the editor of a new anthology, The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers (Norton, 2018).