Poetry Reading: Anna Lena Phillips Bell's "Might Could"

Join us on Friday, May 22nd from 6-7pm as we host Anna Lena Phillips Ball in conversation with Angela DiVeglia and Katherine Hollander to discuss her new collection of poetry, Might Could. Signed copies of each participants books will be available for purchase.

About the book:

In Might Could, Anna Lena Phillips Bell considers how to make a life in hurricane country, amid a verdant landscape touched by industrial pollution and the climate crisis. Poems to familiar plants and to everyday objects—marigolds, a vase, a spoon—invite the reader in, while others act as notes to self, offering wry reminders. At the collection’s core is an extraordinary crown, “Bref Doubles for a Late Conception,” imagining a hoped-for child. Even as they carry the knowledge of potential and actual harm, Bell’s profound, formally inventive poems establish an expansive sense of place and play. With precise intonation, uncanny and often exuberant diction, and subtle humor, Might Could contemplates meaningful companionship with one’s own body, with human family, and with the more-than-human world.

“In Might Could, Anna Lena Phillips Bell emerges as one of the best lyric poets writing in America today, and simultaneously emerges as an even more profoundly rare poet—a poet who has discovered not only a new song, but a new way of making musicality the first concern of poetry. Hers is an irresistible art.” —Shane McCrae, judge, twentieth Anthony Hecht Prize, and author of New and Collected Hell

“I love these poems by Anna Lena Phillips Bell, and I trust you will too. Love her grounded attention to people and plants and place. Love how she worries and wonders about the living world. Love how her phrases sing and how her lines dance over these pages. There is so much to love in Might Could. I’m delighted this book has arrived.” —Camille Dungy, author of America, A Love Poem

“Anna Lena Phillips Bell is a marvelous poet. But what does it mean to say that? For me, it means the thrill of music, the delight in and love of speech that comes to life on every page of her humane and tender collection, Might Could…. Bell is a talent to reckon with.” — Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

About the poets:

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Might Could, winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, released in March 2026. She is also the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. Her work appears in Orion, Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, and Lit Hub, among others. The recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature and the Winter Anthology Award, she has served since 2013 as the editor of Ecotone. She teaches at UNC Wilmington, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in what’s now called North Carolina and beyond.

Angela DiVeglia is an artist, urban gardener, curator, and librarian. Her work centers around visual and immersive research, social movement documentation, public history, post-industrial landscapes, and the transformative power of community archives. She's a founding member of the Papercut Zine Library and the Rhode Island LGBTQ+ Community Archive and serves on the Board of Dirt Palace Public Projects, a feminist artist-run space that offers artists' residencies, exhibitions, and events in Providence, RI.

Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Her book, My German Dictionary, won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, judged by Charles Wright, and was published by the Waywiser Press in 2019. She joined the board as an associate editor in 2021. She is also the author of Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950 (Bloomsbury/Methuen 2025), and teaches creative writing and European history at Tufts University.

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