Elana Bell is a poet, sound practitioner, and creative guide.
She facilitates artistic rituals and processes that support individuals and groups in accessing their authentic voice and alchemizing raw experience and emotion into artistic expression. Whether through her soul-stirring poetry, her sacred sound journeys, or through her inspiring workshops, Elana creates a space where all people’s voices and stories are heard and deeply valued.
Elana is the author of Mother Country (BOA Editions in 2020), poems about fertility, motherhood, and mental illness. She is also the founder of the Mother-Artist Salon, a virtual community dedicated to supporting mothers in their artistic practice. Elana’s debut collection of poetry, 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, and brings her complex heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Elana is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Her writing has appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, and the Massachusetts Review, among others.
Elana holds a certification in Sound and Music Integration from the New York Open Center’s Sound and Music Institute, and leads one-on-one Sound Alchemy Sessions and group Sacred Sound Journeys using a variety of instruments and voice to support participants in tapping into a deep state of relaxation and healing, allowing space to release emotions and open the creative channel.
Elana brings her strong theatre training and soulful voice wherever she goes. She has been a featured poet in numerous venues throughout the United States and abroad including the Bowery Poetry Club, NuYorican Poets Café, Bar 13, Hunter College, Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and Sarah Lawrence College among others. In 2012, Elana created and performed a collaborative, multi-disciplinary performance piece based on the poems in her first collection, Eyes, Stones. She also curates public art installations and performs with Poets in Unexpected Places, a collective of poets dedicated to bringing poetry to public spaces, and sings with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a group of women activists and musicians committed to bringing joy and song to the resistance movement. They have shared the stage with Patti Smith, Angelique Kidjo, Sweet Honey in the Rock, among others.
In addition to her own signature Creative Fire programs, Elana facilitates writing and performance workshops nationally and internationally for participants of all ages. She offers workshops on college campuses, for educators, women in prison and throughout a spectrum of other communities.
For over ten years, Elana served as the writer in residence for the Bronx Academy of Letters, where she founded and developed curriculum for the Intensive Writing Workshop, a bi-weekly class in poetry and fiction for public high school students in the South Bronx. In addition to working as a poet in the schools and developing curriculum for the Community Word Project and the DreamYard Project, Elana teaches creative writing to senior citizens with Poets and Writers.
She was an inaugural finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, an award which recognizes and honors a poet who is doing innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change for her work with Seeds of Peace and Tent of Nations, using creative writing to support dialogue and peace-building for educators and community members from regions in conflict.
Elana has taught literature and creative writing at CUNY College of Staten Island and Brandeis University, and currently teaches poetry to the first year drama students at the Juilliard School.