January 2, 2002
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@sa.ucsb.edu

UCSB Arts & Lectures presents prize-winning poet
Mark Doty reading at Victoria Hall

Summary Facts:

• Mark Doty
• An Evening with the Poet
• Author of Source, My Alexandria, Firebird, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
• Winner of numerous prizes including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize
• Friday, February 1
• 8 pm / Victoria Hall, 33 W. Victoria St., Santa Barbara
• General public $12, UCSB students $8
• Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535

UCSB Arts & Lectures presents acclaimed poet Mark Doty reading from his work on Friday, February 1 at 8 pm in Victoria Hall, 33 W. Victoria St., Santa Barbara. Doty is the author of one extended essay, two memoirs and six volumes of poetry, including the recently published Source (HaperCollins), a book which demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation and force of feeling that have made his poetry significant to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, for his 1993 book of poetry My Alexandria, Doty won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize, making him the first American to win that honor. The American Academy of Arts and Letters has said, “Moving, splendidly observant and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems extend the range of the American lyric poem.”

Doty’s first two books of poems, Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, both long out of print, have been reissued as one volume by the University of Illinois Press. These poems brought Doty to critical attention as one of the first post-Stonewall gay poets to emerge as a major voice in American letters. His third volume, My Alexandria, proved to be his breakout work, winning numerous awards and being chosen for the National Poetry Series by Philip Levine. In his intro to the book Levine 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’s career continued with Atlantis, named a notable book of 1995 by The New York Times, and with Sweet Machine, named a notable book of 1998 by the American Library Association.

Doty, who is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston, has also earned accolades for his prose work. His memoir Heaven’s Coast, about the death of his partner Wally Roberts from AIDS in 1994, won the PEN Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. His second memoir, Firebird, is a gay coming-of-age story that the Washington Post hailed as “a lyrically heartfelt and ultimately haunting account.” His most recent prose work, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, is instigated by his love for a Jan Davidsz de Heem painting but develops into a meditation on all his work’s central themes—beauty, art, knowledge, love and what calls us to be responsive and responsible to these grand ideas.

This reading by Mark Doty is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Tickets, $12 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students, are available at the Arts & Lectures Ticket Office and will be sold at the door the night of the reading, beginning at 7 p.m., if available.

Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Doty will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.