Reynolds Endowed Chair, 308.865.8672
UNK- Award-winning poet Marvin Bell will read from his works on Friday, Oct. 24, at 7:30 p.m. as a part of the University of Nebraska at Kearney Reynolds Writers and Readers Series.
The reading will be held in the Room 138 A and B of the UNK Nebraskan Student Union. A reception, book sale and book signing will follow Bell’s presentation. The event is free and open to the public.
Bell will read from his books of poetry including “Mars Being Red,” “Rampant,” “Nightworks: Poems,” “The Book of the Dead Man,” “Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2,” “New and Selected Poems,” “A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose,” “Iris of Creation,” “Old Snow Just Melting: Essays and Interviews,” “Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry” with William Stafford and “Things We Dreamt We Died For.”
His book, “Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. Another of his books, “A Probable Volume of Dreams,” was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets.
Other honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. Bell also served two terms as the state of Iowa’s first Poet Laureate, beginning in 2000.
Fellow poet Anthony Hecht said of Bell’s works: “Marvin Bell is wonderfully versatile, with a strange, dislocating inventiveness. Capable of an unflinching regard of the painful, the poignant and the tragic; but also given to hilarity, high-spirits and comic delight; and often enough wedding and blending these spiritual antipodes into a new world. It must be the sort of bifocal vision Socrates recommended to his drunken friends if they were to become true poets.”
