NEW YORK (AP) – Tory Dent, a poet and critic whose searing work about living with AIDS won several awards, has died. She was 47.

Dent died Friday at her Manhattan home of an infection associated with AIDS, said her husband, Sean Harvey.

Since she was diagnosed as HIV positive at age 30, Dent published three books of poetry: “What Silence Equals” in 1993; “HIV, Mon Amour” in 2000; and “Black Milk,” which came out in 2005, just weeks before her death.

“HIV, Mon Amour” won several awards, including the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.

It contained unflinching accounts of her daily existence battling AIDS.

“Tory’s work was especially important because so few people who are suffering physically as much as she was are able to communicate with the outside world the way she did,” Harvey said Tuesday. “She had sort of a preternatural drive to communicate the extent of her physical suffering.”

Her editor at Sheep Meadow Press, Stanley Moss, said, “She was a great poet with or without AIDS.”

She was born Victorine Dent in Wilmington, Del., and graduated from Barnard College in 1981. She received a master’s degree in creative writing at New York University and wrote essays and criticism for art journals as well as catalog commentaries for art exhibitions.