The Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill will host a poetry reading by award winning American poet Mark Doty at the First Parish Congregational Church in Truro (1 Parish Lane) on Wednesday, September 16, 2015 at 6:30pm. Tickets for the September 16th reading are $25/$20 for Members.

This lecture will coincide with his workshop “Opening the Poem” which will run from September 14 – 18 (Monday-Friday) from 1-4pm at Castle Hill’s 10 Meetinghouse Road Campus in Truro. The workshop is geared for poets who would like to take their work further by inviting complexity, courting the difficult and unsettling the unknown. The workshop is open to poets at all levels of experience.

Originally from Maryville, Tennessee, Mr. Doty earned his Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont.

Mr. Doty is the author of nine books of poems, including Turtle, Swan (1987) and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991). My Alexandria (1993) was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; upon its publication in the United Kingdom, Mr. Doty would become the first American poet to win the prestigious T.S. Eliot Award for Poetry

Other volumes include Atlantis (1995), Sweet Machine (1998), Source (2002), and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for poetry in 2008. Additional works include a collaboration with the painter Darren Waterston entitled A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: Mark Doty and Darren Waterston's Compendium of Creatures, and The Art of Description: World into Word, a handbook for writers, in which Doty stresses that “poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself.” His most recent collection, Deep Lane, was published by W.W. Norton in 2015.

In addition to poetry, Mr. Doty has also written three memoirs: Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir (1996), Firebird (1999) and Dog Years (2005), a New York Times Bestseller and recipient of the Israel Fishman Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association.

Mr. Doty lives in New York City and is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University.