Abbey Mei Otis is a writer, a teaching artist, a storyteller, and a firestarter, raised in the woods of North Carolina. She loves people and art forms on the margins. Her story collection, Alien Virus Love Disaster (Small Beer Press), was named one of the best science fiction books of the year by the Washington Post, and was a finalist for the 2018 Philip K Dick Award. She has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Tin House, Millay Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook, and the McKnight Foundation. She studied creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers, Oberlin College, and the Clarion West Writers Workshop. At Penn she is an Artist-in-Residence and is working on her first novel.
Her teaching interests include: speculative fiction especially as written by and for queer and marginalized populations, the history of science fiction, folklore, fairy tales, body horror, human-animal hybrids, the grotesque/sublime/monstrous, collaborative storyforms and games, interactive literature, hypertext, experimental video games, anarchist manifestos, pulp and low culture, fanfiction, anti-hierarchical mentoring, critical pedagogy, and community teaching.
