BPL's Whitman at 200 weekend will kick off with a keynote lecture by Mark Doty.
Mark Doty’s nine books of poems and five volumes of nonfiction prose include Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008 and the memoir Dog Years, a New York Times bestseller. The first American poet to receive the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., he’s also received the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Writers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram-Merrill and Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundations. His new book, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, will be published by W W Norton in April 2020. A Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, he lives in New York City.
This keynote and other events during the weekend are co-presented with Poetry Society of America.