Esther Lin

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place (2025), winner of the 2023 Alice James Award and longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. She is also coeditor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024). A recipient of a 2024 Pushcart Award, she was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, she is faculty at the Warren Wilson MFA, a critic-at-large for Poetry Northwest, and a co-organizer of the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community.