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November 21, 2008

Mark Doty Wins National Book Award for Poetry

An acclaimed gay writer just got more acclaimed. Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems won the National Book Award for poetry at an awards presentation Wednesday night in New York City.

"Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion," says a blurb on the website of the National Book Foundation, the organization behind the National Book Awards. "With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis. In this generous retrospective volume a gifted young poet has become a master."

Fire to Fire is a collection of Doty's work from 20 years and seven books of poetry, and it includes new poems as well. The pieces touch on moral ambiguity, art, and sensuality.

Doty -- who splits his time between Provincetown, Mass., and Texas, where he teaches at the University of Houston -- has received much praise for his poems as well as memoirs, which include titles like Firebird, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy, and Dog Years. Doty has been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. (Neal Broverman, The Advocate)

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