About
Meghan Bell’s 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. Her first collection of short fiction, Erase and Rewind (Book*hug, 2021), was the silver medal winner of the 2022 IPPY Awards – Short Story Fiction category and a finalist for the 2022 ReLit Award for Short Fiction. The title story is currently being adapted into a film by Clique Pictures.
Meghan has worked in marketing, digital communications, and grant-writing for multiple arts organizations in the Lower Mainland, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, Evergreen Cultural Centre, Just For Laughs NorthWest / Just For Laughs Vancouver, 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 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).
Shortly before the 2019 Canadian election, Meghan published an essay on The Walrus arguing for a wealth tax within Canada. The essay went viral in Canada and went on to win silver in the 2020 Digital Publishing Awards, and received an honourable mention in Best Canadian Essays 2021. She has since written about wealth, narcissism, and the relationships between capitalism, inequality, and mental illness for The Tyee and Passage. She lives in Vancouver with her husband and daughter.
Email meghanleighbell [at] gmail [dot] com
Instagram @meghanlbell
BOOKS
“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
Meghan Bell 