Linda Michel-Cassidy’s debut story collection, When We Were Hardcore, will be released by EastOver Press in January, 2025. Michel-Cassidy is a writer, critic, teacher, editor, and visual artist. She is a senior book reviews editor 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 holds an 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.
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, 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 is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle where she reads for the translation prize, a board member of the Marin Poetry Center, for which she edits the annual anthology, and a juror for the Northern California Book Awards. 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; 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, 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.