Mark Turpin

He is the son of a Presbyterian minister. He has spent 25 years working construction and building houses. He graduated from Boston University at age 47, with a master's degree.

He lives and works in Berkeley, California.

His work has appeared in The Paris Review,[1] The Threepenny Review,[2] Ploughshares,[3] and Slate.

• 1997 Whiting Award
• 2004 Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award for Hammer

• "Jobsite Wind", Slate
• "Waiting for Lumber", Slate, July 16, 2002
• "The Furrow", Tarpaulin Sky, Winter 2002
• "The Box"; "Pickwork"; "Shithouse"; "In Winter"; "Will Turpin b. 1987"; "Photograph From Antietam", Boston Review, 19.1
• "The Box", Online News Hour, September 2, 2002
• Hammer. Sarabande Books. 2003. ISBN 978-1-889330-86-0.
• Susan Aizenberg, Mark Turpin, Suzanne Qualls (1997). Take three 2. Graywolf Press. ISBN 978-1-55597-254-7.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

"Dear god / one needs to be an expert now," according to one in "A Carpenter's Body" from Mark Turpin's debut collection, Hammer. That explicit need—for intuitive expertise, for intimate knowledge, for skill which ennobles human activity—is central to the author's poetics, and appears to be his answer to Stevens' charge that the modern poem find what will suffice; this is an engaging, lucid and textured book, and one whose novelty (Turpin himself is a carpenter by trade) is far outweighed by its ambition.[4]

• Profile at The Whiting Foundation