Award-winning poet Mark Doty to present 2015 Silverman reading

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Renowned author of poetry and prose and National Book Award winner Mark Doty will present the 2015 University at Buffalo Oscar Silverman Reading at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13, at the Jacobs Executive Development Center, 672 Delaware Ave. in Buffalo.

Doty is also the first American poet to win Great Britain’s Poetry Book Society’s T.S. Eliot Prize for his book, “My Alexandria” (1995).

This event is free and open to the public.

The annual reading is presented in memory of Oscar Silverman, a noted scholar and authority on modern literature who served as director of the UB libraries from 1960-68.

Ansie Baird, Silverman’s daughter, who administers the readings with the assistance of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Dennis, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, says they try to pick one of the best poets they know each year.

Doty is the latest celebrated poet to present a Silverman Reading, part of a group that includes Tony Hoagland, Robert Hass and Eavan Boland.

The Silverman Reading itself has become celebrated for the caliber of its presenters and the unique opportunity guests have to hear noted authors in an intimate setting.

Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including his most recent “Deep Lane” (W.W. Norton, 2015). In 2008, Doty’s “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems” won a National Book Award and was cited by the judges as “Elegant, plain-spoken and unflinching.  Mark Doty’s poems in ‘Fire to Fire’ gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion.”

In addition to winning the T.S. Eliot prize, “Fire to Fire” also received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music,” said former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine.

Doty is a distinguished professor at Rutgers University and also teaches in NYU’s low-residency MFA program in Paris, France. He was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001 and has received two NEA fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.