Marvin Bell has been called "an insider who thinks like an outsider," and his writing has been called "ambitious without pretension." He was for many years the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and served two terms as the state of Iowa's first Poet Laureate. He now teaches for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University and splits the year between Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. He regularly performs with the bassist Glen Moore of the jazz group Oregon. He has collaborated with composers and dancers, as well as musicians, and is the creator of a form known as the "dead man poem,” for which he is both famous and infamous. The most recent of his nineteen collections of poetry and essays are Iris of Creation, The Book of the Dead Man, Ardor, Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, Rampant, and his latest collection, Mars Being Red. Mr. Bell divides his time between Iowa City and Port Townsend, Washington.

Bell is the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Poetry Review and Poetry Magazine, and has held Senior Fulbright Appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia.