Anna Lena Phillips

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, and Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. New writing appears in The Georgia Review, Orion, The Southern Review, Electric Literature, 32 Poems, and Poetry Northwest, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and poets.org. Her poetry and essays are reprinted in anthologies including A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, The American Sonnet, Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene, and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, and her artist’s books have been selected for exhibitions at Abecedarian Gallery and Asheville Bookworks. Her work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Marble House Project, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and she is the recipient of the Winter Anthology Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellowship.

Bell has served since 2013 as the editor of Ecotone. During her time as editor, the magazine has received CLMP’s Firecracker Award for Magazines/General Excellence and the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, and has been a finalist for the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize and the ASME Award for Fiction. Work from Ecotone has been reprinted in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, and The Pushcart Prize, among others. She also edits for Lookout Books, and has been a visiting editor at conferences including the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives with her family near what’s now called the Cape Fear River.

Education

MFA in poetry, Emerson College
BA in English and environmental studies, Guilford College

Specialization in Teaching

Practicum courses in literary-magazine editing and culture; courses in book arts and editing; poetry workshops and craft classes on subjects including ecopoetics, prosody, and the art of sentence making

Courses designed and taught include:
CRW324 Copyediting
CRW324 The Editorial Process
CRW425/525 The Handmade Book
CRW524 Ecotone practicum
CRW526 Advanced Ecotone practicum
CRW542 Poetry workshop—Sequences
CRW542 Poetry workshop—Poetry Escapes the Garden: Experiments in Ecopoetics
CRW525 Writing and Editing Artful Sentences
CRW580 Ecopoetics in Practice

Research Interests

Versification, meter and fixed forms, ecopoetics, printing and book arts, twentieth and twenty-first century US poetry, international poetry, visual poetry, lyric essay, poetry criticism, Appalachian literature, inclusive editing, magazine and book design, intersectional pedagogy

Professional Service

Contributing editor, American Scientist magazine
Judge, Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature
Judge, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Creative Book Award
Panelist, National Endowment for the Arts grants for literary organizations
Judge, ASME Award for Fiction
Juror, c3:initiative Letterpress Residency Program

Community Engagement

Bell founded and directs the Bradford-Niedermann Broadside Series, which features letterpress-printed broadsides of poems from Ecotone and brings a master printer to campus each year to share book-arts skills and knowledge with students and the public. She was the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for Eastern North Carolina from 2019 to 2022, offering workshops and coordinating readings for poets of all ages, and has served as the faculty advisor for UNCW's Writers in Action. Her traveling correspondence station, SEND WORD, has made appearances at UNCW's Writers' Week, Write Wilmington, and local events. She is currently coordinating a public poetry project in collaboration with MFA students in poetry and the New Hanover County Arboretum.

Honors & Awards

Writing
Vassar Miller Poetry Prize
Tennessee Williams Scholar, Sewanee Writers' Conference
Artist in residence, Marble House Project
Fellow, Virginia Center for Creative Arts
Artist grant, Vermont Studio Center
North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in Literature
Winter Anthology Award
Notable Essays of 2021, Best American Essays
Winter Print Residency for Emerging Artists, Penland School of Crafts

Editing
For Ecotone:
Principal investigator on six National Endowment for the Arts grants for literary organizations
CLMP Firecracker Award for Magazines/General Excellence
AWP Small Press Publisher Award
Entropy Favorite Presses, Magazines, Publishers, Journals of 2020–2021
Finalist, Whiting Literary Magazine Prize
Finalist, American Society of Magazine Editors Award for Fiction
Commended, Best Original Nonfiction, Stack Magazine Awards, London
Shortlisted, Best Original Fiction, Stack Magazine Awards, London
Winner, Best Original Fiction, Stack Magazine Awards, London

Reprints of work first published in Ecotone appear in venues including: Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best New Poets, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best of the Net, Best Spiritual Literature, The Pushcart Prize, LitHub, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, 2014–present

Special mentions of work first published Ecotone in venues including: Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Pushcart Prize, 2014–present