photo: Arne Svenson

Tory Dent was born in Wilmington, DE. She received a bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1981 and a master's degree in creative writing at New York University.

She is the author of three volumes of poetry: Black Milk (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), HIV, Mon Amour (1999), which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and What Silence Equals (1993), the title taken from a slogan by the AIDS activist group Act Up.

Dent detailed her struggle with HIV in the vivid and unflinching poems of HIV, Mon Amour. About the book, Yusef Komunyakaa said, "This collection is a whirlpool of energy that seems to be reaching for cinematic clarity, driven by a need to confront modern psychology and ontology until there's a focus of certainty. Here's a map where ideas and experiences collide, and what rises out of the landscape underneath is a poetry that is painful and truthful, beautiful and terrifying, lyrical and narrative, always engaging the intellect and body politic."

Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award; and three PEN American Center Grants for Writers with AIDS.

Her poetry appeared in periodicals such as Agni, Antioch Review, Kalliope, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Pequod, Ploughshares, Fence, and others, as well as the anthologies Life Sentences (1994), The Exact Change Yearbook (1995), In the Company of my Solitude (1995), and Things Shaped in Passing (1997). An essay entitled “The Deferred Dream,” an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress, Many Rivers to Cross, appeared in the collection Bearing Life: Women’s Writings on Childlessness (ed. Rochelle Ratner, The Feminist Press, 2001).

Tory Dent also wrote art criticism for magazines including Arts, Flash Art, and Parachute, as well as catalogue essays for art exhibitions. She lived in New York City and Maine and died in December 2005.