Donald Revell (English) has been chosen as this year's Phi Beta Kappa Poet for the annual Literary Exercises at Harvard University's commencement. Poets so honored in the past include Robert Creely, Allen Ginsburg, and Seamus Heany. Revell currently is writing a poem specifically for the occasion. Its over-arching theme will be the reason of poetry and the ways in which poetry is a language more rational (difficult sometimes, but never obscure) than the language of day-to-day exchange. He is the author of 11 collections of poetry, most recently The Bitter Withy (2009), A Thief of Strings (2007) and Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (2005), all from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry, he has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations. He has been a poetry editor of Colorado Review since 1996. 2014 is the 224th year Harvard's Literary Exercises have taken place.
