Brian Turner

Early life and education Turner was born in Visalia, California, and raised in Fresno and then Madera County through high school and attended Fresno City College before transferring to Fresno State for his BA and MA. He received his MFA from the University of Oregon. He taught English in South Korea for a year, and traveled to Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan.

Military service Turner is a United States Army veteran, and was an infantry team leader for a year in the Iraq War beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999 and 2000 he was with the 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Career Turner has seen his poems published in The Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Georgia Review, Rattle, Virginia Quarterly Review, and ZYZZYVA, and in anthologies including Voices in Wartime: The Anthology (Whit Press, 2005) and Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families (Random House, 2006). His published essays include one for National Geographic and a series of essays for The New York Times blog, Home Fires.

Turner received major media attention for Here, Bullet, interviewed or featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, on Morning Edition and other NPR programs, The Verb (BBC), and many other venues. He was featured in the film, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for a 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Bloodaxe Books published the U.K. edition of Here, Bullet in 2007 His works have been included in such anthologies as The Best American Poetry 2007 and A mind apart: poems of melancholy, madness, and addiction.

Texts by Turner are the basis of the large-scale musical composition Dreams of the Fallen by Jake Runestad, first performed at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans on Veterans Day, 11 November 2013.

Books Here, Bullet, Alice James Books, 2005, ; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2007. Phantom Noise, Alice James Books, 2010, ; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010. My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir, 2014; W. W. Norton & Company The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers, 2018, (editor); W. W. Norton & Company The Goodbye World Poem, 2023; Alice James Books Honors and awards 2016: 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry 2012: JUSFC Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellowship 2009: 2009 Fellow Award from United States Artists 2009: Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship 2008: 2008 Charity Randall Citation 2007: NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry 2007: Poets' Prize for Here Bullet 2006: Maine Literary Award in Poetry 2006: Northern California Book Award in Poetry 2006: PEN Center USA "Best in the West" Literary Award in Poetry 2006: Sheila Margaret Motten Award from the New England Poetry Club 2006: Lannan Literary Fellowship 2005: Beatrice Hawley Award

Personal life Turner married fellow poet Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016) in 2010. He created an album titled 11 11 (Me Smiling) using lines from her poetry, in some instances in her own voice, from tapes of her readings, and others, him reading from her poems.