Award-winning American author is one of the three special guests invited over to the upcoming Campus Book Festival 2020.
Mark Doty is the author of . Many of them, including the New York Times bestselling memoir Dog Years (2007), U.S. National Book Award winning Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2008), have been met with critical acclaim and a wide popular audience. With his poetry collection My Alexandria (1993), Doty became the first U.S. author to win the UK’s Poetry Book Society T.S. Eliot Prize. His second work of non-fiction, Firebird (1999), has been described as an evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America. As an accomplished poet of elegant, intelligent verse, Doty has often been compared to . Deep Lane: Poems (2015) is his lates publication, a collection of eight poems and . Doty is currently Distinguished Professor and Director of Writers House at Rutgers University.
During the three days of the Festival, Doty will be participating in a number of events. On Wednesday 25 March he will joining dramatist Tyrone Grima and ‘Kitba Queer’ Project Manager Marthese Formosa to discuss queer representation in literature, and on Thursday he will be talking about the memoir Firebird with Dr Mario Aquilina and English Department students in a book club discussion. Prof. James Corby will be sitting with the author for an interview on his life and work on Friday. Later that day Doty is expected to join the protest literature-themed Open Mic, organised with Inizjamed.
The 2020 Campus Book Festival will be hosting three international guest writers and researchers from various disciplines, in collaboration with the UM departments of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies; English; and Philosophy. The public will have the opportunity to engage directly with the works of poet and memoirist Mark Doty, theorist and comparative literature scholar Prof. Susan Bassnett, and human information interaction specialist Enrico Panai.
For further updates on the activities mentioned and the full Festival programme, visit the , or the .
