Art of Description: World Into Word

Mark Doty (born in Maryville, Tennessee) is a poet whose work meditates on beauty, grief, gay identity, and the relationship between art and mortality with extraordinary precision and lyric intensity. He attended Drake University and received his MFA from Goddard College. His collection My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press, 1993), written during the AIDS crisis, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His collection Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008) won the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Academy of American Poets, and the Witter Bynner Prize. He teaches at Rutgers University.