Elana Bell‘s first collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones, was selected by Fanny Howe as the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.
She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Her work has recently appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, and the Massachusetts Review.
Elana leads creative writing workshops for women in prison, for educators, for high school students in Israel, Palestine and throughout the five boroughs of New York City, as well as for the peace building and leadership organization, Seeds of Peace.
She was a recent finalist for the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, an award which recognizes and honors a poet doing innovative transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change. Elana teaches literature and creative writing at CUNY College of Staten Island and is poetry editor for the Jewish Journal.