To Marvin: A Celebration of Marvin Bell in Poems

Please join us for a reading and celebration of Marvin Bell’s poetry by his friends, colleagues, and former students, including John Irving, Tess Gallagher, Heather McHugh, David St. John, Naomi Shihab Nye, Kwame Dawes, Ellen Bass, Juan Felipe Herrera, Stephen Kuusisto, Dorianne Laux, Lia Purpura, Eric Pankey, and many more. Nathan Bell will sing, and we will raise a toast to the ways in which this extraordinary poet has shaped our literary landscape. “Your are not beautiful, exactly,” he writes in his famous poem for his wife, “To Dorothy.” “You are beautiful, inexactly.” Marvin’s precise understanding of what the inexact beauty surrounding us means has made all the difference in the lives writers and readers around the world.