Tori Dent (1958-2005) was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She graduated from Barnard College in 1981. She was diagnosed with HIV when she was 30 years old. Dent spent most of her adult life in New York City and Maine. She married writer Sean Harvey in 1999. She produced poetry, often about her struggles and experiences living with HIV. She died in her apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan of the AIDS-associated infection PML.
Dent was the author of Black Milk (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005); HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and What Silence Equals (Persea Books, 1993). Her honors include grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her poetry appeared in periodicals such as AGNI, Antioch Review, Kallipe, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review Pequod, Ploughshares, and Fence. Dent had also written art criticism for magazines including Arts, Flash Art, and Parachute, as well as catalog essays for art exhibitions.
