Esther Lin

Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; her parents had defected from China.^[3] She and her family later moved to the United States, where she lived as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years.^[3][4] At age 27, she received her green card and later became an American citizen.^[4]

Lin's work has been supported by the Fine Arts Work Center, the T. S. Eliot House, Cité Internationale, the Stegner Fellowship.^[3] In addition to her poetry, she serves as a critic-at-large at Poetry Northwest. She also co-runs Undocupoets, an organization founded in 2015 to provide fellowships to other undocumented poets and promote a sense of literary community.^[1][4]

In 2017, Lin released her debut chapbook, The Ghost Wife, which won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship.^[3]

In 2024, Lin's poem, "French Sentence," won a Pushcart Prize.^[3]

In 2025, Lin released her debut poetry collection, Cold Thief Place, which won the 2023 Alice James Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry.^[1][2] In The Rumpus, Asa Drake wrote that "Esther Lin's Cold Thief Place is a testament to this kind of liberation through art—the ability to find oneself reflected in the canon and to, in turn, offer that visibility to others."^[5] Christopher Kempf, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, lauded Lin's clean, spare style, as well as her ability to sharply observe the undocumented immigrant experience.^[6]