In some ways, Celia Bell is like any high school senior these days. She joined in the annual Bryn Mawr senior class bell-ringing May 18 and will graduate June 9.

But she's also writing a novel and preparing to have a medallion hung around her neck at the White House this month.

The Cedarcroft resident was named May 4 as one of 141 Presidential Scholars for the Arts for 2009. She will be honored in ceremonies tentatively scheduled June 20-24. She also won the Gold Portfolio Award in a national contest sponsored by Scholastic magazine and was to be honored at Carnegie Hall by the magazine Thursday, June 4.

Writing appears to be in Bell's blood, and it certainly runs in her family.

Her father is Madison Smartt Bell, director of Goucher College's Kratz Center for Creative Writing, and the author of 12 novels, the eighth of which, "All Souls Rising," was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Her mother is Elizabeth Spires, a professor of writing at Goucher and author of five collections of poetry as well as several books for children. In 1998, she received the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association.

But their daughter says she came to writing on her own.

"I was never pushed to write. It wasn't like my parents were telling me I had to be a writer."

In fact, she cited as her main inspiration her Bryn Mawr Upper School English teacher, Bill Waters, who will accompany her to the presidential scholars ceremony.

"It's almost as much of an honor for him," Bryn Mawr spokeswoman Nancy Sherman said.

Waters, who has taught thousands of students English and creative writing in the past 35 years, said Bell is a writer of rare talent.

"She's the sort of writer I would expect any English teacher to feel fortunate to encounter once in a career," he said. "The irony is that there wasn't a whole lot of work to do with Celia, except to have the good sense to stay out of her way."

Bell remembers writing as soon as she could read, which ironically was later than for most children. But, by second grade, she had made up for lost time and was reading at a middle school level.

By third grade, she was keeping a journal.

By the end of ninth grade, she had written her first novel.

"It was Faustian," she said. "It wasn't very good, but it was something I finished."

Since then, she has published her first work, the short story "100 Names for the Sea," in the literary journal Five Points.

She's even dabbled in poetry, reading a poem called "The Barking Tree" at Bryn Mawr's Thanksgiving convocation last fall. But fiction is her thing.

"Once a year I might have an idea for a poem," she said.

In the fall, Bell will be off to Columbia University in New York to major in English. But first, there's a summer of writing ahead. Bell said she is 50 to 60 pages into her latest novel, an as-yet-unnamed "novel within a novel" that follows the adventures of two kids on a road trip, interspersed with a "retelling of the myth of the Minotaur."

"It's supposed to be surreal," she said. "I think it's going to be good."

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