Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He was raised Nashville, and lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland.He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award.
Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland.
In addition he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice.
His eighth novel, All Souls' Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award, the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race.He won a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.