Kellie Wells is the winner of the 2022 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize. She is also the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Richard Sullivan Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for emerging women writers, and the Baltic Writing Residency. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, Château de Lavigny, and Hawthornden Castle. She is the author of four books: Compression Scars; Skin; Fat Girl, Terrestrial; and God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna.

Her research and writing interests include Victorian spiritualism and stage acts; crime scene dioramas; dystopian/apocalypse literature; speculative/fabulist/slipstream lit; disability and chronic illness in the Anthropocene/Symbiocene/late Capitalist medical-industrial hellscape; the New Realism, anomalous experience, and local spirits; the doomed illusion of spacetime; fairy tales and folktales; and Crones.