Murray State University Reading Series

Each year, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Department of English and Philosophy and the creative writing programs bring nationally known writers to the Murray State campus to give readings of their work.

Summer 2012 MFA Program Residency Visiting Writer

Mark Doty

©Starr Black

Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of seven books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His collection My Alexandria (1993) received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995), Sweet Machine (1998), Source (2001) and the critically acclaimed volume of poems titled School of the Arts (HarperCollins 2005). Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for 2008. Doty is the author of three memoirs: Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007), as well as The Art of Description: World Into Word, a volume in the popular "Art of" series, a line of books intended to reinvigorate the practice of craft and criticism. His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001). In addition to the National Book Award, Doty has also received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, "Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric." Doty was recently elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

For more information, call 270.809.2401 or send an email.

Acknowledgments
Readings are sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy. Thanks also to NPR member station WKMS, 91.3 FM.

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