Mark Doty is the author of six books of poems, two memoirs, and the essay Still Life With Oysters and Lemon. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2008), which was awarded The National Book Award in 2008. This spring Prestel Publishing will publish his collaboration with the painter Darren Waterston, A Swarm, a Flock, a Host: Mark Doty and Darren Waterston’s Compendium of Creatures. He is also at work on a new collection of poems, Deep Lane, and a prose study of Walt Whitman titled What Is the Grass; both will be published by W. W. Norton & Co. His books have won the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, the PEN/ Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He has received fellowships from the N.E.A. and the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting Foundations. He was a 2001-02 fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He teaches at Rutgers and lives in New York City.