Elana Bell
Poetry Professor/The Juilliard School
Biography
Elana Bell is a poet, sound practitioner, and creative guide. Her debut collection, Eyes, Stones (LSU Press, 2012), was selected by Fanny Howe as the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Drawing on her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, the collection considers the complexities of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Bell is also the author of Mother Country (BOA Editions, 2020), poems about motherhood, fertility, and mental illness.
Bell has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Brooklyn Arts Council, among others. Her poems have appeared widely in journals including AGNI, Prairie Schooner, the Harvard Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Southern Review, the Adroit Journal, and Barrow Street, as well as in the anthology Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Israel/Palestine Poets Respond to the Struggle. She was an inaugural finalist for the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, which recognizes poets doing innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change.
Bell facilitates artistic rituals and processes that support people in accessing their authentic voice through sound and writing. In addition to leading her embodied Creative Fire workshops, she teaches poetry to actors at the Juilliard School and sings with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of women activists and musicians committed to bringing joy and song to the resistance movement. Bell is the founder of the Mother-Artist Salon and previously served as poetry editor of the Jewish Journal.
Published Works
Mother Country (BOA Editions 2020)
Eyes, Stones (LSU Press 2012)
Links to Sample Works
- pstprtm, “After Birth”
- AGNI, “Elegy for a Mother, Still Living”
- Split this Rock, “Miracle”
- PBS News Hour, “You Village”
- New Labor Forum, “On a Hilltop at the Nassar Farm”
