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Brandi Neal is a professional writer based in Los Angeles. She is a recovering journalist and skeptic committed to examining the affects of life's unintended consequences.

Her writing has appeared in Portland Magazine, Port City Life Magazine, MovieMaker Magazine, Teaching Tolerance Magazine, The Takoma Voice, The Silver Spring Voice, The Community Leader, The Coastal Journal, The Journal Tribune, Mainebiz, Freshly Hatched and the six weekly newspapers of Mainely Media. She was also a fiction editor for the inaugural issue of the literary review, The New Guard and she was the co-editor of the Winter 2011 Edition of Stonecoast Lines.

Brandi has an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Creative Writing program.  She has a B.A. in Communication and Journalism from the University of Toledo, and a Certificate in Documentary Writing from a three month intensive residency at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

In 2005, while living in Portland, Maine, Brandi co-founded the city’s first and only documentary arts magazine The Blue Room .

Brandi has  traveled a colorful career path. She has worked for a private investigator, she’s tended bar and waited tables, she’s delivered newspapers and sold shoes. She has also worked as a lifeguard, a reporter, an editor, a ghostwriter and a copywriter.

Currently Brandi is revising her memoir Night Swimming, the story of her tumultuous childhood with (and without) her eccentric Vietnam Veteran father.