Linda Michel-Cassidy is a writer, critic, teacher, editor, and visual artist. She teaches workshops in experimental prose, flash fiction, and various writing techniques, 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, and is a Senior Book Reviews Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, where she also contributes criticism. She is also a reader and contributor for Hunger Mountain, and writes criticism for several additional outlets.
Michel-Cassidy holds an MFA in fiction/nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars and another, 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. She attended the NY State Summer Writer's Conference on scholarship, and won the resident writer scholarship at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference. She is an MFA candidate (July 2023) in poetry at VCFA.
Michel-Cassidy 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 (2020), 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 is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle, a board member of the Marin Poetry Center, for which she edits the annual anthology, and a reader for the Northern California Book Awards. She has been a reader for several journals and small presses, and has edited for numerous anthologies. She is a member of Left Coast Writers; the National Book Critics Circle; Northern California Book Reviewers; 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, when time, space, and mood permit. She lives on a houseboat in northern California and in an old adobe in rural New Mexico. Her short story collection will be released early 2024 by Eastover Press.