The Prize | James White | Guidelines
Mark Doty is among the most prominent poets of his generation.
Author of seven volumes of poetry and three major memoirs, Doty is one of the most celebrated American poets to emerge from the 1980s and 1990s.
Most notable in this respect are the highly praised volumes of poetry My Alexandria (1993) and Atlantis (1995) and the prose memoir Heaven’s Coast (1996), which deal poignantly and frankly with the failing health and ultimate death of Doty’s partner Wally Roberts.
His most recent book Fire to Fire was awarded the National Book Award in 2008. My Alexandria was chosen by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a National Book Award finalist. The volume also won Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize, making Doty the first American to earn that honor. In addition to numerous awards such as the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Doty has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
We have been honored to have Mark Doty as the inaugural judge of the White Crane/James White Poetry Prize.