Mark Scott

Mark Scott was born on 28 September 1959, in Denver, Colorado, the second of five children of William F. and Sarah M. Scott. His youngest brother died in 1969; his sister was born in 1971; his younger brother died in 1984. His older brother and his sister live in Denver.

He attended public schools from kindergarten through high school, excepting ninth grade, which he spent at Denver Country Day School, where he began writing poetry. He attended the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1977 to 1982.

He spent the 1979–80 year studying European History (400–1500) at University College London, where he was a member of the swimming club and the Literary Society.

He received his Masters in 1986, and began teaching composition at Rutgers in 1987. Poems of his were published in Raritan: A Quarterly Review and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1990 and 1991. He entered a rehabilitation clinic on the Rutgers campus in 1990. In 1992, he finished his dissertation, and went to work for HarperCollins Publishers as an Editorial Assistant in the College Division.

Between 1993 and 1995, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Literature at Mills College in Oakland. From 1996 to 1998, he was an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University and the University of San Francisco. He was also a temporary office worker and an assistant in a salmon-smoking operation in San Francisco.

In 1995, he rode in the California AIDS Ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, in memory of his brother.

He moved to Carbondale, Colorado in 1998, and worked for a summer at Mountain Blue Turf Farm on the Strang Ranch. In October 1998, he was hired by Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy policy research and consulting nonprofit, to write grant proposals.

In 2001, Scott went to Shanghai and taught English at Shanghai University for a year. On returning, he taught at the University of Colorado for a year and wrote a draft of a book about a small-business owner. The manuscript is unpublished.

After teaching high school for a year in Sterling, Colorado, he began teaching at College of Saint Mary in Omaha, Nebraska, becoming an Associate Professor in 2010. In 2012, Scott accepted an appointment as “Foreign Instructor of English” at Nara Women’s University in Nara City, Japan, where he is now a Professor of English.

Scott’s second collection of poems, A Bedroom Occupation: Love Elegies, was published by Lumen Books in 2007. His third, Balance Sheets, was published by Kingston University Press on May 1, 2022.