Terena Elizabeth Bell

Learn more about Terena Elizabeth Bell at terenabell.com

Biography

Terena Elizabeth Bell is a fiction writer. Her debut short story collection, Tell Me What You See (Whiskey Tit), publishes Holiday 2022. Short fiction, poetry, and journalism work have appeared in The Atlantic, Playboy, Yale Review, MysteryTribune, Santa Monica Review, Saturday Evening Post, and more than 100 similar publications throughout the US, the UK, Ireland, and Spain. Short fiction has won grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

She is a 2021 NYFA City Artists Corps winner, a 2018 Arlene Eisenberg Award winner, a 2018 Azbee Award of Excellence winner, and Centre College’s 2014 Distinguished Young Alumna of the Year. Lead editor of the Writing Through the Classics series of books on fiction craft, she has taught creative writing independently and through the New York Society Library, Woodlawn Children’s Home, and Bowling Green State University.

From 2005 to 2015, Bell served as CEO of an international translation company and, in 2012, was appointed to President Barack Obama’s White House Business Council by US Representative John Yarmuth. She holds a BA in English from Centre College and an MA in French from the University of Louisville. Originally from Sinking Fork, Kentucky, she lives in Manhattan, where her landlord once was Philip Roth.

Writer’s Studio

Experimental Writing—Forms and Functions

From formatting crime fiction as mortuary reports to including interview transcripts in memoir or using images instead of words, experimental writing can be anything. At its best, it truly is a creative experiment — not a rehashing of techniques that used-to-be avant garde but are no longer. How do you know if this ever-evolving genre is for you? And how do you write it? We’ll start by talking about what experimental writing is — and isn’t — then look at present-day examples from writers who are truly pushing the edge of craft. Sessions will then focus on generating new experimental prose, poetry, and what lies between, with final sessions culminating in an honest and positive workshopping of one another’s art with actionable feedback for students moving forward.

Learn more about non credit offerings Writer’s Studio.