About

Welcome to Word Forward! I’m Michelle Turner, and I’ve been nurturing a love affair with language for nearly as long as I can remember. In elementary school, I hoarded my allowance to purchase English, Spanish, and French pocket dictionaries. In sixth grade, I’d walk to a bakery owned by a German-speaking couple, so I could practice important phrases such as “I’d like some chocolate, please” (“Ich hätte gerne etwas Schokolade, bitte”). Then I received the best gift I could imagine—an electric typewriter—for those endless afternoons composing stories, poems, and news articles. I still hear the noisy drama of the “return” key, a train tearing around the corner to the next paragraph.

Today I carry that same passion for language, along with a deep appreciation for how writing and literature create unique spaces to try on new ideas, inhabit our emotions, and meaningfully experience others’ lives. Writers and readers have the opportunity to engage in powerful acts of empathy—and to better understand our beautifully complicated selves. This is why all writing, at its best, is a form of creative writing. We must imagine: how do my readers think and feel? How would I feel? We must strive to connect, to trade places—and what an honorable endeavor in this world.

With such endeavoring in mind, I created Word Forward to help writers of all stripes. I work with new and experienced poets, novelists, memoirists, academic writers, and more. I am acutely aware of the courage and vulnerability it often takes to write those first words, to keep going, and then to share those words. I also understand the compulsion you might feel to bring an enormous world within you to life. As your editor, writing coach, or manuscript consultant, I will honor your vision, compassionately challenge you to stretch your abilities, and provide guidance that is personalized to your creative process.

 My background includes a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, a Bachelor of Arts in English and Spanish from the University of Virginia, and TEFL/TESOL certifications from uniTEFL International in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I have taught creative, technical, and academic writing at colleges, universities, and community centers, and my poetry has been published in nationally distributed literary magazines, such as the Baltimore Review, Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, and Slice. To sample my work, I welcome you to visit my author site.

 If you’d like to learn more about me or how Word Forward could work for you, please reach out! I’ll be looking forward to it.