No charge for the program. Advance registration required. Register online in order to receive the Zoom session invitation link and readings packet. Please email Michael Bellacosa at mbellacosa@wiltonlibrary.org with any questions.

Mark Doty, born in 1953, came into his own, recognized as a major American poet at the end of the 1990s. His poetry books Alexandria (1993) and Atlantis (1995) gained him recognition within the poetry world and reached lovers of poetry. He has written several books since the late 1990s. Philip Levine wrote that Doty was “a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music.” He has been the recipient of many awards and taught at several universities. He is a longtime resident of Provincetown, Mass.

Aware of his homosexuality, he was frightened by it and married at the age of 18, but divorced his female wife after graduating from Drake University, Iowa, and moved to Manhattan. He received his MA in Creative Writing from Goddard. His first great love was Wally Roberts who died of AIDS in 1994. After Wally’s death he couldn’t write. However, a friend suggested he write a memoir—and he did. In Heaven’s Coast, Doty came to grips with Wally’s death. He won high praise for it plus he was the first American to receive the T.S. Eliot prize for this work. Also, his memoir about his dog’s death affected many readers. Someone said Doty held “a magnifying glass to his subjects to unearth depth and meaning.” Mark Doty’s sensitivity and humaneness reach out to us in his poems as he examines all aspects of life within cities, woods and along the shore.

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, “Borrowed Scenery,” Yuganta Press, and “Through the Trees of Autumn,” Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s  young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild. Several of her poems have been published in Amethyst Review.