Personal Information about Gene Doty

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Childhood

I was born on the western slope of Colorado, in a small town called Craig. I grew up on a farm in east central Kansas. There were a lot of ranches in that area, and we raised cattle as well as wheat, corn, alfalfa, and other crops. I grew up on horseback, learning to ride when I was four or five years old.

I grew up with people who remembered the frontier in Kansas. These people included my adoptive father, George W. Warren IV, who was born in frontier Kansas in 1889.

As a boy in that country, I did such work as field hoeing, branding cattle, driving cattle to be shipped to market, castrating cattle and hogs, assisting in the births of calves and pigs, hauling hay, shoveling grain (wheat, oats, milo), grinding grain and hay for feed, mowing, raking, plowing, and combining. Weather hardly ever kept us from working, whether the temperature was 20 below zero or 100 above.

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Who is Eugene Warren?

My birthname was Doty (my father was Floyd Doty). However, I grew up as Eugene Warren, not Gene Doty, after my mother's divorce and remarriage. Until 1988, my poetry and other writings were signed Eugene Warren. Much of my poetry deals with my life in Kansas. Some can be found in my book, Geometries of Light, published by Harold Shaw in 1981, as Eugene Warren.

Nose to Nose, a collection of 52 haiku (Brooks Books 1998), is published as Gene Doty. However, I have been publishing sijo as gino peregrini.

I changed my name from Eugene Warren to Gene Doty in August of 1988, reassuming the name I was given when I was born.

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Marriage

Gene and Rose

Rosalee and I were married in January of 1963. We have four children and seven grandchildren (as of 1998). Being a grandfather satisfies me more than almost anything else that has happened. We are, also, attached to our animal companion, a collie-terrier mix named Eight-Ball.

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Education and Career

I received a Bachelor of Arts in English and Fine Art from Emporia State University in 1966 and a Master of Arts in English from that school in 1967.

I began teaching at the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1967 and have been here ever since.

Courses I've taught include Freshman Composition, Creative Writing, Technical Writing, Advanced Composition, the Bible as Literature, World Literature, and Fantasy Literature. I've written a lot of poetry, published in journals and in several books and anthologies. I've also written criticism on Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Russell Hoban, and James Blish, among others. Some of these articles have been published and others read at conferences. I've also written and published a little fiction and some articles on poetics.

More details about my education and career

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My own spiritual practice includes yoga (asanas and pranayama) and Centering Prayer (a revival of ancient Christian contemplative prayer).

My poetry better expresses my spiritual state/attitude/limits/questions/certitude than any prose could.

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