Menu Menu Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Might Could, winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize, forthcoming from Waywiser Books. Her other books are Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press, and her artist’s books include A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized prosody guide. New poems and essays appear in magazines including The Southern Review, Electric Literature, Orion, and The Georgia Review. Formerly a senior editor at American Scientist, since 2013 she has served as the editor of Ecotone and an editor of the magazine’s sister imprint, Lookout Books.
During Bell’s time as editor of Ecotone, the magazine has received the Firecracker Award for Magazines/General Excellence, the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, and Best Original Fiction in the Stack Magazine Awards, as well as six grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; work from its pages has been reprinted in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. In addition, Ecotone was a 2021 finalist for the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize and the ASME Award for Fiction. An associate professor of creative writing in UNC Wilmington’s MFA and BFA programs, Bell lives with her family near what is now called the Cape Fear River, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond. Find her online at annalenaphillipsbell.net.
