Mark Doty: August Portrait of the Month

Mark Doty, Provincetown, MA, 1992

Born in 1953 in Maryville, Tennessee, Mark Doty is an award-winning poet and memoirist. He holds a BA from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. His first book of poetry, titled Turtle, Swan, was published in 1987. When his partner Wally Roberts tested positive for HIV in 1989, Doty’s writing changed dramatically. My Alexandria, Doty’s 1993 book, is largely informed by the AIDS epidemic; it brought the author important accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Roberts’s death in 1994 inspired Doty’s 1995 book of poetry, Atlantis, as well as his 1996 memoir Heaven’s Coast. Another memoir, 1999’s Firebird, deals with the author’s childhood in the American South and in Arizona. Dog Years (2007), which won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award, is about coping with the loss of a lover and the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Doty’s poems are published frequently in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. His most recent collection of poems, Fire to Fire, won the 2008 National Book Award for poetry. Doty is currently Distinguished Professor and Writer-in Residence in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He lives in New York City and the Springs in East Hampton, New York.