National Book Award for Poetry: Mark Doty
The poetry prize went to University of Houston professor Mark Doty for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins), while the fiction award went to 81-year-old Peter Matthiessen for Shadow Country (Modern Library).
Doty has taught in the UH Creative Writing Progam since 1999, but next spring he begins teaching at Rutgers University. Fire to Fire brings together new poems with selections from his previous seven collections, including My Alexandria (1993), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other nominees in the poetry category included Richard Howard, who taught for many years in the Creative Writing Program at UH.
By FRITZ LANHAM Houston Chronicle book editor
Nov. 19, 2008, 11:23PM
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Brian Michael Shaw
