Mark Merlis (March 9, 1950 – August 15, 2017[1]) was an American writer and health policy analyst.
[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] His first novel, American Studies, was published in 1994[4] 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 1998[5] and won the 1999 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.
[7][8] 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.