Michelle Tea

In February 2019, Michelle won the PEN / Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for Art of the Essay for her book Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions, and Criticisms! (Feminist Press, May 2018).

In 2018, Against Memoir was published by Feminist Press.

In 2016, she created Amethyst Editions, an imprint of Feminist Press.

In San Francisco, Tea immersed herself in the literary and spoken word scene. It was "...very democratic. There were open mics every night. The poetry was self-taught – punk and hip-hop inspired street poetry. It was perfect for me. I felt I could be my whole self, which at that point was queer, feminist, punk and working-class.”

Michelle Tea was in a relationship with Katastrophe, a transgender hip-hop artist, for many years. They shared an apartment in the North Beach district of San Francisco. In 2013, Tea married Dashiell Lippman at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. In 2015, her son was born.

In 2012, Tea partnered with City Lights Publishers to form the Sister Spit imprint.

From 2012 to 2015, Tea wrote a column for XOJane, where she chronicled the difficulties she faced in trying to have a baby with her partner, Dashiell. Her articles documented the stress and difficulty that accompanied fertility treatments and artificial insemination, and additionally illuminated gaps that existed for queer couples in a system that was created with heterosexual couples in mind.

In February 2008, Tea was the 23rd Zale Writer-in-Residence at the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College Institute at Tulane University. She did not go to college and, in interviews, has discussed the assumption that she has studied.

She was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize by the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in 2008.

Tea is known for her work as an organizer and advocate for local artists and writers. In 2003, Tea founded Radar Productions, a nonprofit organization that produces events to showcase the work of queer writers and artists. She served as the Creative Director for twelve years before stepping down in 2015, so that she could focus on other pursuits. Juliana Delgado Lopera, a creative writing instructor at San Francisco State University, took her place. In 2015, Radar created Drag Queen Story Hour in San Francisco. The event, at which drag queens read books to kids, now happens in several cities around the United States and in Tokyo, Japan.

In 2000, the memoir Valencia, was published. The book chronicled the life of Michelle, a young lesbian poet, in the Mission district of San Francisco. The plot primarily focused on the love life of the main character, as she dated multiple women over the course of a year. She explained in an interview, "The 'Michelle' in the book is definitely me, though if it makes a reader more comfortable to imagine it’s all a giant work of fiction, that’s fine too." The book launched Tea into local and literary fame, especially after winning the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

While touring together in the year 2000, Tea and writer Clint Catalyst came up with the idea to solicit first-person narratives for their 2004 anthology, Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache. Described by Publishers Weekly as a "celebrat[ion of] the avant-garde," the book, which includes work by JT Leroy, Dennis Cooper, and Eileen Myles, reached #10 on the Los Angeles Times non-fiction paperback bestseller list in its first week of release. Moreover, the book was a 2004 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the Anthologies/Fiction category. Her books have often been nominated in the competition, beginning with the 2001 Lesbian Fiction nomination and award for Valencia.

In 1998, her first book, The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, was published by Semiotexte/Smart Art Press. The book provided short stories in memoir form, exploring topics such as Tea's childhood in Massachusetts, her teenage interest in the goth subculture, and sex work.

In 1994, Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson formed Sister Spit, a queer feminist collective. The group hosted weekly open mic nights in San Francisco, which attracted local and underground talent, as well as more established writers such as Mary Gaitskill, Eileen Myles, and Beth Lisick. In 1997, Sister Spit launched Ramblin’ Road Show, a spoken word tour that performed in bars, galleries, bookstores, community centers, and other venues in the United States and Canada. The tour was briefly revitalized in 2007 with Sister Spit: The Next Generation, which featured artists such as Ariel Schrag, Justin Vivian Bond, Blake Nelson, Nicole J. Georges, Cristy Road, Eileen Myles, and Beth Lisick.

During this period, Tea supported herself with two minimum wage jobs as a hair salon receptionist and deli shop employee. Her girlfriend, a sex worker, was earning significantly more money than she did. She decided to go into sex work as well. In the early 1990s, Tea broke up with her girlfriend and moved to San Francisco.

Michelle Tea (born Michelle Tomasik, 1971) is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and was identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their views into the queercore community.