Home » Literary Arts » From the Desert to the Sea: A Video Conversation with Mark Doty – Poet, Essayist, Memoirist

From the Desert to the Sea: A Video Conversation with Mark Doty – Poet, Essayist, Memoirist

INTRODUCTION: 2:45 min.

Introduction to Mark Doty

Mark Doty (b. 1953) is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He received the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.

Doty is the author of nine books of poetry and four books of prose. In 2015, W.W. Norton published Deep Lane, “which the publisher calls a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life.” His volumes of poetry include Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Source, (HarperCollins, 2002), School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005) and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award.

Doty has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Cornell, and New York University. He was the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at The University of Houston Creative Writing Program for ten years, and is currently Distinguished Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he directs Writers House, an undergraduate community for writers.

U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize recipient Stanley Kunitz said, “Mark Doty’s most representative poems are tender, intimate, open, and true. They have their roots in the essential dailiness of this life, with its ritual round of small duties and encounters, and they open out . . . into a world of embracing sympathy, camaraderie, and understanding. With his clarity of vision and great heart, Doty stands among us an emblematic and shining presence.”

We interviewed Doty at the Miami Book Fair, MDC. The videos below are organized by topic and run between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. Tap on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos.

UNDERSTANDS THE AUDIENCE’S PERSPECTIVE: 1:27 min.