Brandi Wells 

Biography

My writing, research, and teaching circle around the speculative, whether that’s situated in realism or the fantastical. My debut novel, Cleaner, is a work of meta-fiction—its nighttime narrator imagines stories and lives for the daytime workers she never sees. I consider the capitalist workplace as a dystopian setting and explore a range of dystopias and apocalypses across feminist and queer speculative work. My students undertake imaginative play in crafting everything from fantasy worlds to the narrators of their persona poems. As a first-generation college graduate, I’m particularly interested in whose stories are told, whose voices are elevated, and having those conversations with students, as they begin the work of positioning themselves as experts in their fields.