photo: Marion Ettlinger

Mark Doty was born in 1953. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award; School of the Arts (2005); Source (2002); and Sweet Machine (1998).

Other collections include Atlantis (1995), which received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award; My Alexandria (1993), chosen by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, and was also a National Book Award finalist; Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991); and Turtle, Swan (1987).

He has also published Heaven's Coast (1996), which the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Other memoir by Doty includes Firebird (1999), Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (2000), and Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2007).

Doty has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Houston, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Houston.