"Live as if you were already dead" is the Zen admonition animating Marvin Bell's brilliant poetic invention, Dead Man Poems.
Marvin Bell was born in New York City 1937, and raised in rural Long Island. He attended Alfred University and the University of Chicago. He enjoyed a long teaching career at the University of Iowa, where he influenced generations of poets and was the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. Bell has published twenty-one volumes of poetry and served as Iowa's first Poet Laureate. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa and Port Townsend, Washington.
