About
Meghan Bell is an editor, writer, poet, graphic designer, and interdisciplinary artist. Her writing has appeared in over a dozen literary journals and magazines, including Rattle, Joyland, Grain, The Puritan, Prairie Fire, The Walrus, and Contemporary Verse 2, as well as in festivals such as the Vancouver and Victoria Fringe Festivals and the Victoria Film Festival. Meghan has worked in marketing, digital communications, and grant-writing for multiple arts organizations in the Lower Mainland, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Honda Celebration of Light, Just For Laughs NorthWest, and Room Magazine, where she was publisher from 2016-2019. In 2017, along with Chelene Knight, Arielle Spence, and their colleagues at Room, she co-founded the feminist literary festival Growing Room, and acted as the festival’s marketing and development manager, working under festival directors Spence (2017) and Knight (2018, 2019), for its first three years. The festival received glowing coverage by The Toronto Star, The Georgia Straight, The Tyee, Discorder Magazine, The Vancouver Sun, and The Quill & Quire, among others. Growing Room was cancelled indefinitely in 2020 due to COVID-19. Meghan also was the lead editor, designer, and project coordinator for the publication of the magazine’s fortieth anthology, Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine (Caitlin Press, 2017), which The Literary Review of Canada described as: “A bold new anthology . . . as good as any argument you could find that feminism is best grappled with, unwound, thought out and pressed forward not through treatises, but through literature . . . In the hashtag and hot-take era, it is a relief to wade through a female world as beautiful and broken and messy as this one.”
Shortly before the 2019 Canadian election, Meghan published an essay on The Walrus arguing for a wealth tax within Canada, drawing on her experiences as the child of multimillionaire capitalists to explore greed and other pathologies of the very rich. The essay went viral in Canada and went on to win silver in the 2020 Digital Publishing Awards. She has since written about wealth, narcissism, and the dangers of capitalism for The Tyee and Passage. In November 2019, Meghan joined Resource Movement, a community of young Canadians with wealth and/or class privilege working toward the redistribution of wealth, land, and power.
Meghan has two degrees from the University of Victoria (BSc Honours Psychology, BA Creative Writing, 2011). She is currently an MFA candidate in UBC’s Creative Writing program. Her first short story collection, Erase and Rewind, will be published by Book*hug in 2021. Meghan is of Calabrian (Southern Italian), Irish, Scottish, and German descent. She lives and writes on the traditional, unceded, and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples (Vancouver, BC).
Email meghanleighbell [at] gmail [dot] com
Instagram @meghanlbell
BOOKS
(May 2021)
“Utterly bold, darkly funny, candid and bizarrely tender, Meghan Bell’s debut is a testament to being young and female, lost, lonely, and neurotic, while simultaneously trying to navigate the perilous journey of everyday life. Bell’s surreal stories will captivate with their gritty and melancholic insight.”—Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family
Caitlin Press (March 2017)
“In the hashtag and hot-take era, it is a relief to wade through a female world as beautiful and broken and messy as this one.”—Rosemary Westwood, The Literary Review of Canada
