Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2026 Norma Farber First Book Award, and also Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award. She is the co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.

(Photo credit: Quinlan Corbett)