Thursday, April 16th
Q&A: 3:30 PM, Fried Hemenway Auditorium, Martha Miller Center
Reading: 7:00 PM, Winants Auditorium, Graves Hall
Marin Bell has written over twenty-three books and remains well known for developing the “Dead Man” poem form. In discussing the Dead Man poems, Judith Kitchen of The Georgia Review writes: “I believe Marvin Bell’s Dead Man poems should close any anthology of the twentieth century and open any anthology of this new century’s work. They change the game.”
Some of his poetry collections include Mars Being Red, a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Award, Which See, Stars Do Not See, a finalist for the National Book Award, andA Probable Volume of Dreams which was selected as a Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets.
Bell has been published in The New Yorker, Chicago Review, New Republic, Poetry, Harper’s Bazaar, Harvard Review, The Atlantic Review, The Nation, Hudson Review,and numerous other journals.
During two separate time periods, he wrote informal columns about poetry for The American Poetry Review. Bell has edited for The North American Review, The Iowa Review, and he conceived and edited for five years an annual series for Lost Horse Press called New Poets/Short Books.
His literary honors include awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of arts and Letters, the American Poetry Review, along with Guggenheim, NEA fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. In 2000, Bell was named Iowa’s first Poet Laureate and served two terms.
He did graduate work in journalism at Syracuse University and later in literature and writing at the University of Chicago and University of Iowa. For many years, Bell served as the Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Bell and his wife Dorothy split their time between Iowa City and Port Townsend, Washington. Currently, he serves on faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.
