Tuesday, January 27, 2004

WILMINGTON, N.C. – The Department of Creative Writing proudly presents a reading by celebrated poet and memoirist Mark Doty at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 5 in Cameron Hall 105 on the University of North Carolina at Wilmington campus. This free, public event will be followed by a book signing and reception in the lobby.

Mark Doty has written six books of poetry, including My Alexandria, which won the 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Award and which was selected for the 1992 National Poetry Series by poet Philip Levine, who said, "If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music."

Doty has also published an autobiography, Firebird (HarperCollins, 1999), and Heaven's Coast: A Memoir (1996), which received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Doty's poetry has appeared in such magazines as Ploughshares, Poetry, Mid-American Review, and Missouri Review. He is also the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Whiting, and Ingram Merrill foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts, Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Doty's work has been described as "endearingly honest, yet non-confessional" (Marjorie Lewellyn Marks, Los Angeles Times Book Review), filled with "a pulsing lyricism" and an awareness of "the way an individual identity is shaped by collision with the collective, how one's self is defined through encounter with the social world" (from The Cortland Review, December 1998).

Speaking of his craft, Doty admits "I don't see myself ever becoming a polemical poet, or writing to advance a particular cause, but at the same time I can't believe that it's okay for us to go on tending our private gardens while there is so much around us demanding to be addressed."

Doty teaches at the University of Houston, and divides his time between Provincetown and Houston. For spring 2004, he is teaching a poetry workshop as a distinguished visiting professor in UNCW's Master of Fine Arts Program.

For further information and accommodations for disabilities, contact the Department of Creative Writing at 910/962-7063 three days prior to the event.