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Mark Doty has won the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. “Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion,” according to the citation issued by the National Book Foundation. “With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis. In this generous retrospective volume a gifted young poet has become a master.” The National Book Foundation announced the award at its annual ceremony in New York City on November 19.
Doty’s eight books of poems and four books of nonfiction prose have been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award and, in the United Kingdom, the T.S. Eliot Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Doty has read in the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series on two occasions—in 1996 and 2007. He will be introducing poets Tina Chang, Brenda Shaughessy, and Tracy K. Smith—all of whom he has taught in the past—at the final event in this year’s Writers at Rutgers Reading Series on Wednesday, April 1, 2009.
Doty currently teaches at the University of Houston. He will join the Rutgers English Faculty as a Distinguished Writer in the fall semester of 2009. He lives in New York City with his partner, Paul Lisicky.
About Fire to Fire (from the publisher):
Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times. |
