National Book Award winner to speak at Purdue Literary Awards 2013

Mark Doty Download Photo

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Internationally acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty will read a selection of his works at 8 p.m. April 8 in Stewart Center's Fowler Hall.  The Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts and Purdue University Libraries are sponsoring the free, public event as part of the 82nd annual Purdue Literary Awards. 

Doty has written eight collections of poetry, with his most recent, "Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems," taking home the 2008 National Book Award.  Some of his other award-winning collections are "Atlantis," which won the Ambassador Book Award and Lambda Literary Awards, and "My Alexandria," chosen for the National Poetry series and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the United Kingdom's T.S. Eliot Prize.  His body of poetic work rounds out with his collections "School of Arts," "Source," "Sweet Machine," "Bethlehem in Broad Daylight" and "Turtle Swan." 

Doty has made his mark in the world of nonfiction, as well, receiving the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction with his memoir "Heaven's Coast."  "Dog Years," one of his four other works of nonfiction prose, was a New York Times bestseller in 2007.

He lives in New York but is a professor and the writer in residence at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Doty will also speak at the Literary Awards Banquet at 5:30 p.m. in Purdue Memorial Union's North Ballroom on the creative process of writing.  The banquet honors Indiana high school students and Purdue graduate and undergraduate students with more than 80 awards and $11,000 in prize money.

Banquet tickets are $17 and $25 for adults and can be purchased beginning Monday (March 11) in Heavilon Hall, Room 324, or by directing inquires to the Purdue English department at jhenders@purdue.edu.

Tickets include a pre-dinner reception, dinner, awards ceremony and reserved seating for Doty's reading in Fowler Hall. The pre-dinner reception is 4:30-5:15 p.m. in Purdue Memorial Union's Anniversary Drawing Room.

Writer: Morgan Stephens, 765-490-4855, morganlstephens@gmail.com