Mark Doty

Mark Doty-Poet

Born on 10  August 1953,Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, earned his 

 Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his 

Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont. He

 has described himself as having been “a sissy”; frightened by his emerging 

sexual identity, he married hastily at age eighteen 1989. His partner Wally

Roberts tested positive for HIV, which drastically changed Doty's writing.

 Roberts's death in 1994 inspired Doty to write Atlantis. Heaven's Coast: A 

Memoir also deals with this subject and received the PEN/Martha Albrand 

Award for First Nonfiction. In 1995, he was the first American poet to win the 

£10,000 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, for his book My Alexandria. The book was 

also a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the 1993 Los 

Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle

 Award. Doty also received a 1994 Whiting Writers' Award. He has written 

twelve books of poetry and three memoirs. He lives in New York City and

 Fire Island, New York. He was the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the 

graduate program at

 The University of Houston Creative Writing Program. 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. He is the 

inaugural judge of the White Crane/James White Poetry Prize for Excellence 

in Gay Men's Poetry.

Doty is a judge for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize.

He now teaches at Rutgers University. His husband since 1995 is the writer Paul Lisicky.