Mark grew up in Tennessee in a religious household. In youth he moved constantly because his father was a member of the Army Corps of Engineers. He decided to become a professional poet at age sixteen, then dropped out of college at eighteen and married, began to teach, and dropped back in, this time graduating.
He realized he was gay in 1981, after his marriage had failed. He moved to New York where he began his new life in his twenties with Wally Roberts and a budding career as a poet. Since then he has become a prominent figure in American poetry and an important link to others who have lost someone to AIDS or are living with the disease themselves.
He was taught at various universities in the USA, including Sarah Lawrence College, Brandeis University and at Vermont College. His poetry addresses homosexual themes explicitly but a spiritual sensibility pervades all of his work, and his poetry suggests universal themes such as love, loss and death.
In 1996 he published his memoir Heaven's Coast for which he won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. This memoir contains a moving account of the death from AIDS-related illness of his long-term lover Wally Roberts in 1994. He lives in Provincetown and Houston and teaches at the University of Houston. He has been called upon as an ambassador of U.S. poetry to judge works for prizes and he writes for poetry journals as well as teaching workshops and doing readings.
Doty is the author of five highly acclaimed books of poetry, including 1998's Sweet Machine. He has won, among other honors, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has received numerous fellowships. He is also the author of Firebird, which he describes as "a sissy boy's story," about the growth of his aesthetics in his childhood years.
Excerpts from: Gabriele Griffin, Who's Who in Lesbian and Gay and Writing, Routledge, London, 2002 - et alii
