Mark Doty

Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, to Lawrence and Ruth Doty, with an older sister, Sarah Alice Doty. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. Doty's first collection of poems, Turtle, Swan, was published by David R. Godine in 1987; a second collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, appeared from the same publisher in 1991. Booklist described his verse as "quiet, intimate" and praised its original style in turning powerful young urban experience into "an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend suffering". Doty's "Tiara" was printed in 1990 in an anthology called Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS. This poem critiques the way society perceived and treated homosexual AIDS sufferers. The 1980s marked the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The Reagan administration's delayed action to fight AIDS resulted in thousands of deaths, especially among young gay men.