March 27, 2000

Mark Doty, a nationally acclaimed poet and author, will be the guest poet at this year's Wallace Stevens Poetry Program. The program, presented by UConn's English department with the generous support of The Hartford and with the assistance of the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, will also feature poetry readings by UConn students who won the Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest.

Samantha Myers, a graduate student in family studies, won first place in the contest. Chris Anderson, a graduate student in English, was the second place winner. Robert Dunn, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology, won third place.

Doty and the students will read at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center's Konover Auditorium at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 5. A second reading will be held at the Charter Oak Cultural Center, 21 Charter Oak Ave., Hartford, at noon on Thursday, April 6.

Doty's five books of poems, which include My Alexandria and Sweet Machine, have received the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Writers Award and Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry. He is also the author of the memoir Heaven's Coast, which won the PEN Martha Albrand Prize for Nonfiction for 1996 and was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Firebrand, another memoir, was published in 1999.

Doty lives in Provincetown, Mass., and Houston, where he teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Houston.

Allison Thompson