Background
Mark Doty was born on August 10, 1953, in Maryville, Tennessee, United States, to Lawrence Woodworth and Ruth S. Doty.
Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, United States
Doty received a Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont, United States
Doty received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
(The poignant, accomplished new collection of poetry from ...)
The poignant, accomplished new collection of poetry from the author of My Alexandria-1993 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1993 National Book Award Finalist.
https://www.amazon.com/Atlantis-Poems-Mark-Doty/dp/0060951060/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(Part memoir, part journal, part elegy for a life of rare ...)
Part memoir, part journal, part elegy for a life of rare communication and beauty, Heaven's Coast evinces the same stunning honesty, resplendent descriptive power and rapt attention to the physical landscape that has won Doty's poetry such attention and acclaim.
https://www.amazon.com/Heavens-Coast-Memoir-Mark-Doty/dp/0060928050/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old ...)
In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!" Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One.
https://www.amazon.com/Firebird-Memoir-Mark-Doty/dp/0060931973/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, he offers a stunnin...)
In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with a human store, and why.
https://www.amazon.com/Still-Life-Oysters-Lemon-Intimacy/dp/0807066095/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for ...)
When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he brings home Beau, a large, malnourished golden retriever in need of loving care. Joining Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family, Beau bounds back into life. Before long, the two dogs become Doty's intimate companions, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days. Dog Years is a poignant, intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about living, love, and loss.
https://www.amazon.com/Dog-Years-Memoir-Mark-Doty/dp/0061171018/?tag=2022091-20
2007
(Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of his seven b...)
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of his seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought, as one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our time.
https://www.amazon.com/Fire-New-Selected-Poems/dp/0060752513/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(Here, reset and containing almost two dozen poems that ap...)
Here, reset and containing almost two dozen poems that appeared in small magazines but have never before been collected, are the complete texts of Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight to which Doty has contributed a new introduction.
https://www.amazon.com/Paragon-Park-Mark-Doty/dp/1567924425/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(In this beautifully illustrated book, respected painter D...)
In this beautifully illustrated book, respected painter Darren Waterston and distinguished poet Mark Doty come together to breathe new life into the medieval genre. Waterston's precise and haunting silhouettes depict species from insect to bird to mammal, captured in motion as they hunt their prey, build their nests, or protect their young. Accompanying these illustrations are Doty's poetic observations on the wonders of the animal world - its panoply of sounds and shapes, its dignity and its cruelty. Lovers of art, animals, and poetry will delight in this elegant volume that captures nature's exquisite and terrible beauty.
https://www.amazon.com/Swarm-Flock-Host-Compendium-Creatures/dp/3791347578/?tag=2022091-20
2013
Mark Doty was born on August 10, 1953, in Maryville, Tennessee, United States, to Lawrence Woodworth and Ruth S. Doty.
Doty received 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.
After completing his undergraduate studies at Drake University in Iowa, he moved to Manhattan, where he paid his dues as a temporary office worker. In the interim, however, Doty was publishing his early work. The first volume of poems, Turtle, Swan, was rejected by the publisher David Godine, only to be accepted by Godine after urgings from author Roger Weingarten whose works had also been published by Godine. Doty's second collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, was published in 1991.
In 1993 his work, My Alexandria, appeared. Here, Doty writes about the pain of life as seen through the prism of AIDS.
After Doty's partner Wally Roberts' death, Doty found himself unable to write or even read for a period of time. Atlantis was a response to, and in many respects a description of, Wally's illness and death. However, the solicitation of a poem by a friend who was editing an anthology led him to the writing, not of a poem, but of a book-length memoir, Heaven’s Coast, in which he came to grips, in prose, with Wally’s life and death.
Following Heaven's Coast was the 1998 poetry collection Sweet Machine. In 1999, Doty published a second memoir, Firebird, where Doty recalls his experiences as a young boy growing up, including those of an often difficult family life and an increasing awareness of his homosexuality.
In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Doty presents an extended meditation on a Dutch still-life painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem, painted in Antwerp 350 years earlier. One more his essay is The Art of Description (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."
In 2001 appeared his poetry collection called Source. He wrote the poems during a four-year period in which he traveled through Iowa, Texas, and Massachusetts as a visiting writer. Four years later Doty published In School of the Arts, a book of verse from 2005. His volumes of poetry also include Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2008).
In Dog Years: A Memoir, Doty chronicles his complex, loving relationship with the pair of dogs, Arden and Beau, who helped nurture and sustain him as he dealt with Wally's illness and death.
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 currently 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.
(In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old ...)
1999(Part memoir, part journal, part elegy for a life of rare ...)
1996(Here, reset and containing almost two dozen poems that ap...)
2012(The poignant, accomplished new collection of poetry from ...)
1995(In this beautifully illustrated book, respected painter D...)
2013(When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for ...)
2007(In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, he offers a stunnin...)
2001(This is the first cloth edition of one of the most highly...)
1993(Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of his seven b...)
2008Doty 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
Doty described himself, in Publishers Weekly, as having been “a sissy” in childhood; frightened by his emerging sexual identity, he married hastily at age eighteen.
Mark Doty married Ruth Dawson, a poet, in 1971, but they divorced, in 1980. During his period in Goddard College, he met his lasting love, Wally Roberts, a window-dresser at a department store. The couple lived together for twelve years in Manhattan and in Provincetown, Massachusetts; Wally’s illness and death from AIDS, with which he was diagnosed in 1989 and to which he finally succumbed in January, 1994, was to be the central event of Doty’s maturation as person and poet. (Doty himself tested negative for HIV.)
From 1995 until 2010, his partner was the writer Paul Lisicky. They were married in 2008 and divorced in 2013. He currently lives with his partner 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.