Anna Lena Phillips Bell

I write and make artist’s books for the same reasons I’ve made a garden every place I’ve lived: for joy and sustenance. Many of my poems act as notes to self, messages from parts of myself that know better or more—pay attention, slow down. Plants are a great model for this: they ask of us a careful, deep attention, and they themselves move and grow in their own time. My parallel practice as a printer requires similar care. I make work also to find new ways of talking about ecological and social-justice problems that fall under what Rob Nixon calls slow violence—incremental effects that add up to significant harm to people and ecosystems. My aim is to play, in what’s at risk of becoming the ruins, in the hope of unruining them a little.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell_Ornament_Vassar Miller Poetry Prize no. 24_University of North Texas Press_2017

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St. Brigid Press. She is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature, and is the 2019–2022 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for eastern NC. Bell’s artist’s books, including A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized guide to prosody, have been selected for exhibitions at Abecedarian Gallery and Asheville Bookworks. Recent work appears in the Southern Review, Subtropics, and the Common Online, and in anthologies including Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. The editor of Ecotone, she teaches at UNC Wilmington, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in what’s now called North Carolina and beyond.