MICHELLE LIN (THEY/SHE) IS A VISUAL ARTIST, POET, & CULTURAL WORKER.

BIO

Michelle Lin is a visual artist, cultural worker, and author of the poetry collection A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). Their writing and art practice are rituals of grief and healing from the violence of patriarchy, capitalism, assimilation, and living within the imperial core. Passionate about building liberatory spaces for diasporic and queer artists, they work as the Artist Growth Program Director at ARTogether and serve on the Advisory Councils for Vital Arts and Artists’ Adaptability Circles.

ETC

Michelle’s collection of poems, A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), is a lyrical examination about the inheritance of stories and cyclical nature of trauma. Their second manuscript The Year of the Horse is Dead was a finalist for the CSU Poetry Center Open Book Poetry Competition. Her poetry has been published in over 30 literary journals, and was anthologized in Bettering American Poetry, a book series seeking to dismantle the gatekeeping, tokenization, and marginalization of poets of color.

Michelle has taught literary art workshops through the United States of Asian America Festival, LEAPs summer program, Gluck Fellows Program for the Arts, Young Writer's Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh. They have performed their poetry at Lamba Lit Fest, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, San Jose Poetry Festival, Berkeley Poetry Festival, San Francisco’s Litquake, the Bryant Park Reading Series, and more.

Michelle is an arts and cultural worker passionate about building loving and liberating spaces for LGBTQ+ artists and artists of color. Since 2015, they have coordinated multiple art programs and festivals in the Bay Area that center the voices and visions of queer artists of color. They served as the former Northern California Regional Co-Chair of Kundiman and curator of Kearny Street Workshop’s reading series, KSW Presents. You can learn more about the events and programs they coordinated here.

Michelle is a co-host and co-producer of Kearny Street Workshop’s first podcast with cultural scholars Kazumi Chin and Dara Del Rosario. The first season of We Wont Move: A Living Archive released on March 9th and features conversations with APA artists of the past, present, and future whose stories shape the movements and dreams of San Francisco.

They were a member of Kindred Accelerator, an interdisciplinary network of BIPOC artists devoted to decolonizing and liberating their arts practice, a 2021-23 Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow focused on deepening EDI (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion) work and mental wellness for arts professionals of color, a 2022 In Surreal Life Fellow encouraging play and community for contemporary poets, and a Kundiman Fellow.

Michelle is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program and of the University of California Riverside’s Undergraduate Creative Writing program, where they were awarded the William Henry Willis Poetry Award, Birk Hinderaker Poetry Award, and Chancellor's Award for Undergraduate Excellence and Creative Work for her writing and arts activism. In 2016, her poetry was featured through the Public Poetry Project for the Pennsylvania Center for the Book.

Michelle has nearly a decade of experience in nonprofit development, grassroot fundraising, event coordination, community art program design, and communications. They have worked for RYSE—a Black and Brown youth-led empowerment center rooted in healing, organizing, and justice—and for API Legal Outreach, a nonprofit providing free legal services for immigrant communities. Michelle has also served as leading editors for literary journals Twelfth House Journal, Mosaic, Hot Metal Bridge, and B.E. Quarterly.

From 2020-23, Michelle was a Twitch streamer known as “sadwitheyebrows” or “Brows,” and worked to build joyful and healing-centered co-working and gaming spaces with Queer and Trans folks.

They live with their brilliant partner, Kazumi Chin, and their dog Daniel Lee on unceded Ohlone land in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they hike, bird watch, nap, and dream of ways to be in intentional and loving relationships with community and the land.