Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of seven books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2008, Harper). The first, Turtle, Swan,appeared in 1987. His third collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995), Sweet Machine (1998), Source (2001), and School of the Arts (2005, HarperCollins). He is the author of the memoirs Heaven’s Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), andDog Years (2007), for which he won an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” (2001). Among his many other awards are two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, “Mark Doty’s poems extend the range of the American lyric.” Doty teaches in the graduate program the University of Houston, and is a frequent guest at Columbia University, Hunter College, and NYU. He lives in Houston and in New York City.
