Anna Lena Phillips Bell

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. Her artist’s books include A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized prosody guide. 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 her time as editor of Ecotone, work from the magazine 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; and Ecotone has received 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. In addition, Ecotone was a 2017 and 2020 finalist for CLMP’s Firecracker Awards and a 2021 finalist for the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize and the ASME Award for Fiction. An assistant 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.

From the Editor – Issue 33

•In the Lap of the Atlantic

Hello from the ocean. Which is to say, hello from a salutary winter beach walk. It’s gotten pretty cold here on this coast, but a walk by the shore is often still the ticket.

From the Editor – Issue 32

•Watering the Trees

Last fall, the release of the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was—or should have been—a wake-up call.

From the Editor – Issue 31

•Bad News in a Kind Voice

This fall I invited Adam Terando, a research ecologist with the U. S. Geological Survey, to visit with Ecotone’s editorial staff, to help us get a better collective sense of what the climate crisis means.

From the Editor – Issue 30

•In Cases of Emergency

There are times when it seems wise to choose something wholesome and healthy as a midday snack. A banana, say.

From the Editor – Issue 29

•Gardening As Resistance, Gardening As Joy

In a time when many of us have rooted in and down, while yet more of us venture out to care for the sick and provide the services that keep us all going, I have found it useful to garden, if haphazardly.

From the Editor – Issue 28

•The Work of Love

Love—word we fill up with our desires and fears, utter with sincerity, toss around carelessly—when we were deciding on the theme for this issue, it seemed perhaps a foolhardy choice. But Ecotone was entering its fourteenth-anniversary year—the number for sonnets, valentines. And we are sometimes foolhardy.

From the Editor – Issue 27

•Venerable Instructions

What should a literary magazine look like? What form should a magazine of place take in the physical world? These were the questions faced, some eight years back, by Ecotone’s longtime art director, Emily Louise Smith.

From the Editor – Issue 26

•Material Life

Oh, plastic, scourge of the Anthropocene, shaped into adorable shapes and dyed multifarious colors; plastic, who will be with us forever: it’s easy to forget about you, but when I remember you’re here, I’m annoyed and freaked out all at once.