Mark Merlis

Mark Merlis (March 9, 1950 – August 15, 2017¹) was an American writer and health policy analyst.²³

Born in Framingham, Massachusetts on March 9, 1950, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland,² Merlis attended Wesleyan University and Brown University.² He subsequently took a job with the Maryland Department of Health to support himself while writing.² In 1987, he took a job with the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress as a social legislation specialist, and was involved in the creation of the Ryan White Care Act.²

Beginning in the 1990s, Merlis published a series of novels.² His first novel, American Studies, was published in 1994⁴ and won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Literature and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 1995,³ and his second, An Arrow's Flight, was published in 1998⁵ and won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.³ He published two further novels during his lifetime, Man About Town in 2003⁶ and JD in 2015.⁷⁸

Merlis lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and worked both as an author and an independent health policy consultant.³

Merlis died on August 15, 2017, at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, from pneumonia associated with ALS.¹ He was sixty-seven years old. He is survived by his husband of many years, Robert Ashe.³

• American Studies (1994)
• An Arrow's Flight (1998) - also published as Pyrrhus (1999)
• Man About Town (2003)
• JD (2015)