Esther Lin
Esther lin
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2026 Norma Farber First Book Award, and also Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award. She is the co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
Cold thief place
This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life—three times on three different continents—and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it's possible to truly know one's parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a green card marriage in order to live a "normal life."
Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point-of-view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American—that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to.
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