Mark Doty

Mark Doty (born August 10, 1953) is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Early life
Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, to Lawrence and Ruth Doty, with an older sister, Sarah Alice Doty. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
Career
Doty's first collection of poems, Turtle, Swan, was published by David R. Godine in 1987; a second collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, appeared from the same publisher in 1991. Booklist described his verse as "quiet, intimate" and praised its original style in turning powerful young urban experience into "an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend suffering".
Doty's "Tiara" was printed in 1990 in an anthology called Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS. This poem critiques the way society perceived and treated homosexual AIDS sufferers. The 1980s marked the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The Reagan administration's delayed action to fight AIDS resulted in thousands of deaths, especially among young gay men. Some believe the initial reluctance to mobilize was due to homophobia—society was, at the time, uncomfortable with gay sexuality. This poem criticizes the idea that gay men "invite[d] their own oppression as a consequence of pleasure." The poem's phrase "he asked for it" represents this common, unsympathetic opinion about gay men with AIDS. Imagery like "perfect stasis" and "body's paradise" is used by Doty to paint a future beyond brutality and discrimination for AIDS sufferers. According to Landau, Doty's poems were "humane and comforting narratives" that offered hope to people living with HIV and stood in contrast to the hostile climate of the United States.
His third book of poetry, My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press, 1993), reflects the grief, perceptions and new awareness gained in the face of great and painful loss. In 1989, Doty's partner Wally Roberts tested positive for HIV. The collection, written while Roberts had not yet become ill, contemplates the prospect of mortality, desperately attempting to find some way of making the prospect of loss even momentarily bearable. My Alexandria was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Philip Levine, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. When the book was published in the U.K. by Jonathan Cape, Doty became the first American poet to win the T. S. Eliot Prize, Britain's most significant annual award for poetry.
Doty had begun the poems collected in Atlantis (HarperCollins, 1995) when Roberts died in 1994. The book won the Bingham Poetry Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Heaven's Coast: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 1996), is a meditative account of losing a loved one, and a study in grief. The book received the PEN Martha Albrand Award First Nonfiction.
Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Deep Lane (W.W. Norton, 2015), a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. He has also written essays on still life painting, objects and intimacy, and a handbook for writers. His volumes of poetry include Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Source, (HarperCollins, 2002), School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005) and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award.
Doty's three memoirs include Heaven's Coast, described as "searing" by The New York Times, is the excruciating journaling of his thoughts subsequent to hearing his lover's diagnosis with AIDS, a work "layered" with awarenesses like Dante's trip through hell (HarperCollins, 1996), and Firebird: A Memoir, an autobiography from six to sixteen, which tells the story of his childhood in the American South and in Arizona (HarperCollins, 1999). These first two
memoirs received the American Library Associations Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award. His most recent memoir, Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2005), was a New York Times Bestseller and received the Barbara Gittings Literature Award from the American Library Association in 2008.
Doty's essays include Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (Beacon Press, 2001), a book-length essay about 17th-century Dutch painting and our relationships to objects, and The Art of Description (Graywolf Books, 2010), a collection of four essays in which "Doty considers the task of saying what you see, and the challenges of rendering experience through language."
He served as guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2012 (Scribners, 2012).
Doty has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Cornell and NYU. He was the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at The University of Houston Creative Writing Program for ten years, and is Distinguished Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he directs Writers House. He has also participated in The Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers, and was on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in August 2006. He is the inaugural judge of the White Crane/James White Poetry Prize for Excellence in Gay Men's Poetry.
Doty was a judge for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2014, he was welcomed as a trustee of the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.
In 2011, Doty was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Personal life
From 1995 until 2010, his partner was the writer Paul Lisicky. They were married in 2008 and divorced in 2013. Doty currently lives with his husband Alexander Hadel in New York City and in the hamlet of The Springs in East Hampton, New York. The couple married in October 2015 in Muir Woods National Monument.
Awards
1992: National Poetry Series Winner for My Alexandria
1993: National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for My Alexandria
1993: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry for My Alexandria
1994: Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities
1994: Whiting Award
1995: T. S. Eliot Prize for My Alexandria
1995, 2001, 2008: Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry for Atlantis, Source, Fire to Fire
1997: Pen/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction for Heaven's Coast
1999: Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award
2007 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography for Dog Years
2008: Stonewall Book Award for Dog Years
2008: National Book Award for Poetry
2018: Robert Creeley Award
Bibliography
Poetry
Collections
. Reprinted with Turtle, Swan by University of Illinois Press, 2000.
. Reprinted from Sweet Machine.
. Reprint of Turtle, Swan, and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, with a selection of early poems.
. With Darren Waterston.
List of poems
Memoir
Edited
2003: Open House: Writers Redefine Home, St. Paul: Graywolf Books
Essays
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Performances and recorded media
Live performance
2014: The Poetry Brothel, November 10, 2014.
Audiotapes
1996: My Alexandria, University of Illinois Press
Videotapes
1998: Poetry Heaven, a three-part video series, The Dodge Foundation, New Jersey
1999: Mark Doty: Readings & Conversations, Lannan Literary Videos, Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles
1999: "Fooling with Words", Bill Moyers PBS special, September
See also
LGBT culture in New York City
List of LGBT people from New York City
Poetry analysis
References
External links
Audio: Mark Doty at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008: A Reading
Audio: Mark Doty at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2008: Keynote Address
Mark Doty performing "Pipistrelle" on the Indiefeed Performance Poetry Podcast
Mark Doty's Poets.org bio
Mark Doty's University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign bio
Profile at The Whiting Foundation
2011 Whiting Writers' Award Keynote Speech
Modern American Poetry
Academy of American Poets
'Something Understood', review of The Art of Description in The Oxonian Review
1953 births
Living people
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American poets
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American poets
American gay writers
American LGBT poets
American male poets
Drake University alumni
English-language poets
Gay memoirists
Gay poets
Goddard College alumni
Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty
Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry winners
LGBT people from Tennessee
National Book Award winners
People from Fire Island, New York
People from Provincetown, Massachusetts
Sarah Lawrence College faculty
Stonewall Book Award winners
T. S. Eliot Prize winners
The New Yorker people
University of Houston faculty