Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and A Pocket Book of Forms, a fine-press guide to poetic forms. Her chapbook Smaller Songs was released by St Brigid Press in 2020. The recipient of an NC Arts Council Fellowship in literature, and the 2019–2021 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for eastern North Carolina, she has served since 2013 as the editor of Ecotone. Her work appears in Five Points, the Southern Review, and Subtropics, and in anthologies including A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia and Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South. She teaches in the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.