Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of six books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His third collection, My Alexandria, received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis, Sweet Machine, Source, and the most recent critically acclaimed volume of poems, School of the Arts. He is the author of the memoirs Heaven's Coast, Firebird, and Dog Years and the book-length essay "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon". Among his many awards are two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, "Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric." Doty teaches in the graduate program the University of Houston. He lives in Houston and in New York City.

www.markdoty.org

Dana Goodyear is the author of Honey and Junk, a collection of poems, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2005. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and also writes "Postcard from Los Angeles," a blog on the magazine's Web site. www.danagoodyear.com