Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea (born Michelle Tomasik, 1971) is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, prostitution, and other topics.^[1] She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and currently lives in San Francisco.^[2] Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their views into the queercore community.^[1] In 2012 Tea partnered with City Lights Publishers to form the Sister Spit imprint.^[3]

Spoken word and magazine writing

Tea was the co-founder of the Sister Spit spoken word tour.^[1] She has toured with the Sex Workers' Art Show^[4] alongside Ducky DooLittle and others. She is also a contributor to The Believer magazine^[5] and was the co-writer of the weekly astrology column, Double Team Psychic Dream with astrologer Jessica Lanyadoo, in the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper.^[4]

Recent work

Michelle Tea founded Radar Productions in 2003 and currently serves as their Creative Director. A non-profit based in San Francisco, Radar Productions produces a number of literary-based projects in the Bay area and beyond.^[6]

More recently, Tea has continued to step outside her work as a writer to serve as the Executive Producer of Valencia: The Movie. Based on her novel of the same name, the experimental film was spearheaded with filmmaker Hilary Goldberg.^[7][8] Valencia was filmed by 20 different lesbian, queer and trans directors, each assigned a different chapter of her novel. The twenty one different ‘Michelle’ characters “vary in age, gender, size, ethnicity, style and era” ^[9]

Michelle Tea is also currently writing an ongoing series for XOJane where she chronicles the difficulties she is facing trying to have a baby with her partner, whom she calls Dashielle.^[10][11] Her articles document the stress and difficulty that accompanies fertility treatments and artificial insemination, and additionally illuminates gaps that exist for queer couples in a system that was created with heterosexual couples in mind.^[12][13][14] Her experiences trying to conceive and preparing for parenthood led her to start the website Mutha Magazine, an alternative mothering/parenting website that caters to those parents that do not identify with mainstream parenting media.^[15] Of the project she says “I think there are a lot of women who get pregnant and have babies but they're not part of this cultural traditional ideas of what it means to be a mom and they're not interested in the media that's already out there.”^[15]

Academics

In February 2008, Michelle was the 23rd Zale Writer-in-Residence at the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College Institute at Tulane University.^[16] She did not go to college and, in interviews, has discussed the assumption that she has studied.^[4]

Critical acclaim

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,"^[17] 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.^[18] Moreover, the book was a 2004 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the Anthologies/Fiction category.^[19] Indeed, her books have won a nomination in the competition virtually every year since her Valencia won for best Lesbian Fiction in 2000.^{[20][21][22][23][24][25]}

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

Published work

• The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America (1998) ISBN 1-57027-074-0
• Valencia (2000) ISBN 1-58005-035-2
• The Chelsea Whistle (2002) ISBN 1-58005-073-5
• The Beautiful (2003) ISBN 0-916397-89-0
• Rent Girl (2004) ISBN 0-86719-620-3
• Rose of No Man's Land (2006) ISBN 1-59692-160-9
• Transforming Community (2007) ISBN 0-9789023-4-3
• Coal to Diamonds: A Memoir (2013) ISBN 0-385525915 (with Beth Ditto)
• Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (2013) ISBN 1-938073363

Anthologies

• Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person (ed. with Clint Catalyst) (2004) ISBN 1-55583-753-0
• Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (ed.) (2004) ISBN 1-58005-103-0
• Baby, Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl's Writing (ed.) (2006) ISBN 0-7867-1792-0
• Sister Spit: Writing, Rants and Reminiscence from the Road (ed.) (2012) ISBN 0-87286-566-5

References

External links

• Official website
• "Sister Spit Takes Over REDCAT". The Advocate. 
• "Read Local: 10 New and Forthcoming Books from City Lights". SF Weekly. 
• "Michelle Tea turns a radical eye on YA in Mermaid in Chelsea Creek". Los Angeles Times. 
• "Tea and Spit". OUT.