About
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is a poet, writer, teacher, editor, and printer. Bell is the author of Might Could, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, forthcoming March 2026 from Waywiser Books. She is also the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. Poems appear in journals including the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, Electric Literature, Orion, the Sewanee Review, 32 Poems, and Subtropics, and in anthologies including Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. Other projects include SEND WORD, a letter-writing station, and Forces of Attention, a series of letterpress-printed objects designed to help people use screened devices as they wish. She is also the author of A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized, fine-press guide to poetic forms.
Bell is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature and the winner of the Winter Anthology Award. Her work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Marble House Project, and Penland School of Crafts. She formerly served as senior editor at American Scientist, covering botany, ecology, and the arts, and in 2013 became editor of Ecotone, the literary magazine that seeks to reimagine place, and Lookout Books, at UNC Wilmington. Under her editorship, Ecotone has won CLMP’s Firecracker Award for Magazines/General Excellence, the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been a finalist for the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize and the ASME Award for Fiction. With Beth Staples, she is coeditor of Making Literary Magazines: A Complete Guide for Editors, Writers, and Students, forthcoming in 2027 from the University of Chicago Press. An associate professor in UNCW’s MFA and BFA programs in creative writing, she lives with her family near what is now called the Cape Fear River, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.
For a briefer bio, visit here.
For other proflections, visit Instagram, Ecotone, Bluesky, American Scientist.
Site design: Ryan Bloom
Bell is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature and the winner of the Winter Anthology Award. Her work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Marble House Project, and Penland School of Crafts. She formerly served as senior editor at American Scientist, covering botany, ecology, and the arts, and in 2013 became editor of Ecotone, the literary magazine that seeks to reimagine place, and Lookout Books, at UNC Wilmington. Under her editorship, Ecotone has won CLMP’s Firecracker Award for Magazines/General Excellence, the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been a finalist for the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize and the ASME Award for Fiction. With Beth Staples, she is coeditor of Making Literary Magazines: A Complete Guide for Editors, Writers, and Students, forthcoming in 2027 from the University of Chicago Press. An associate professor in UNCW’s MFA and BFA programs in creative writing, she lives with her family near what is now called the Cape Fear River, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.
For a briefer bio, visit here.
For other proflections, visit Instagram, Ecotone, Bluesky, American Scientist.
Site design: Ryan Bloom
