Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived as an undocumented immigrant in the United States for 21 years. She won the 2023 Alice James Award for her forthcoming debut book Cold Thief Place. Lin has been an artist-in-residence at Cité internationale, Paris; a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Hyperallergic, New England Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Currently she is a critic-at-large for Poetry Northwest. She lives in Seattle.