Tory Dent

Victorine "Tory" Dent (January 1, 1958 – December 30, 2005) was an American poet, art critic, and commentator on the AIDS crisis.

Life Dent was born in 1958 in Wilmington, Delaware. She graduated from Barnard College in 1981 and then got a master's degree in creative writing from New York University. She was diagnosed with HIV when she was 30 years old. and What Silence Equals (Persea Books, 1993). Her honors include grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award; and three PEN American Center Grants for Writers with AIDS. Her poetry appeared in periodicals such as AGNI, The Antioch Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, and Fence. Dent had also written art criticism for magazines including Arts, Flash Art, as well as catalog essays for art exhibitions.