Josh Bell attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and a Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellow. His PhD is from the University of Cincinnati — where he held a Distinguished Graduate fellowship — and he received the Diane Middlebrook fellowship from the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing and the Walter E. Dakin fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The author of a previous collection of poems, No Planets Strike, Bell has been a member of the creative writing faculty at Columbia University and is currently Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, on English, at Harvard University. He has had poems recently published in The Awl, Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Tin House, as well as in the anthologies Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande), Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll (MTV Books), and Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Books by Josh Bell:

c Other poems on the web by Josh Bell:
Two poems
Three poems
"Where the I Comes From"
"What Do You Think About My Epigraph?"
"Blue Safari"
"Zombie Sunday"
"Sleeping with Julia Roberts"

About Alamo Theory:

"This is a speaker who has seen too much, felt too much, who cannot bear much more, but who still believes in us, and in his job, enough to try to bring back an accurate report from the large and the small broken heart."
—Jorie Graham

"Josh sings as if he had both a feather and a pistol held to his throat — objects that somehow (so absurd and surreal is his world) merge into the same provocation."
—Cal Bedient