Prose
Select Essays, Reviews, and Articles
“A Man on Fire Running Quite Fast,” a review of Adrian Matejka’s Somebody Else Sold the World, rhinopoetry.org
“Fish,” winner of the Chapter One Competition, Meet Me @ 19th Street / Arch Street Press, 2021
“Battle-Axe Day,” Pushcart Prize Nomination, Hypertext Magazine, 2020
“Chicken,” winner of the non-fiction prize, NELLE 2020
“A Review of Mike Puican’s Central Air,” rhinopoetry.org
“A Review of Natasha Saje’s Vivarium,” rhinopoetry.org
“The Skin Essay” in 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn Over 50, QuillsEdge Press 2018
“Freedom is a Bitch: A Review of Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen,” The Nervous Breakdown, 2018
A Reflection on Negative Capability in the Poetry of Erika L. Sanchez.” Keats Letters Project
“The Liquid Sentence: Hedy Habra’s Under Brushstrokes.” Blue Fifth Review 2017
A Review of Eve Packer’s New Nails (Fly By Night Press 2011). The Mom Egg 2012
“The Turn as Poetic Striptease in Anne Carson’s ‘Wildly Constant’.”
Current Project
Virginia is currently at work on a creative nonfiction project, Let the Hounds Give Tongue: Essays on the Ten Years I Knew My Father. The first chapter, “Fish,” won the 2021 Chapter One Competition from Meet Me @ 19th Street / Arch Street Press. The fourth chapter, “Chicken,” is the winner of the 2020 nonfiction prize from NELLE literary magazine. Chapter 6 appeared under the title, “Battle-Axe Day” in Hypertext and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020.
For this project, Bell takes inspiration from the following lines:
He makes out of myrrh an egg as big as he can carry. Then he tests it to see if he can carry it. After that he hollows out the egg and lays his father inside and plugs up the hollow. ~ Anne Carson’s translation of Hekataios, fr. 324 (circa 500 BC
Still from Birute Sodeikaite’s short film “In Perpetuum.”