Linda Michel-Cassidy’s debut story collection, When We Were Hardcore, was released by EastOver Press in February 2025. Michel-Cassidy is a senior editor for book reviews as well as collaborative and cross—disciplinary texts at Tupelo Quarterly, where she also contributes criticism. Michel-Cassidy teaches workshops in experimental prose, flash fiction, and editing, and conducted The Eight Books That Made Me podcast for the Mill Valley, CA Library. She was a contributing editor at Entropy Magazine, where she edited podcast reviews, wrote reviews and conducted interviews.
Michel-Cassidy’s story collection is on the Pen America long list for the Robert W. Bingham prize for debut story collection and won a National Indie Excellence Award for regional fiction. She won the Emma Bell Miles prize for the essay, and second place in the James Still Prize for fiction. Her poems have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her stories have been twice nominated for Best of the Net. She has been a finalist for a number of publication prizes, including: Rose Metal Press (twice, a heartbreak), Glimmer Train, Better, CCM, Nautilus, C&R, and Narrative. She attended the NY State Summer Writer's Conference on scholarship, and won the resident writer scholarship at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference.
Michel-Cassidy holds MFAs in fiction/nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, in poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and in visual arts from the California College of the Arts. She has an editor's certificate from University of California, Berkeley, and has attended residencies at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Breadloaf, and Tin House. In 2018, she was a cross-disciplinary resident at Gullkistan in Laugarvatn, Iceland, and returned in 2019 as an alumni. In 2025, she was a resident at Residency on the Farm in southern Wisconsin, and in spring 2026, she will be a resident at Write On Door County, also in Wisconsin.
Michel-Cassidy is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle where she reads for the translation and Leonard prizes, a board member of the Marin Poetry Center, for which she edits the annual anthology, and a juror for the Northern California Book Awards in poetry. She has been a reader for numerous journals and small presses, and has edited several anthologies. She is a member of The San Francisco Writer’s Grotto; Northern California Book Reviewers Association; the Editorial Freelancers Association; and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.
Michel-Cassidy is at work on a collection of brief nonfiction/prose poems as well as a poetry manuscript. She is a metalsmith and installation artist, and swims open-water with the San Francisco Dolphin Club. She lives on a houseboat in northern California and in an old adobe in rural Northern New Mexico.