Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She was also a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017–2019 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.

“Esther Lin is the daughter of a difficult mother. The fact that her mother emigrated from China to Brazil, where Lin was born, and then onto the United States, where her mother, believing the world was going to end, did not apply for citizenship for her children, makes the story all the more complicated. Now that her mother has died of cancer, Lin is able to look back on her life more fully, though not without a great deal of pain.”
—David Starkey, California Review of Books

"Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin is a debut poetry collection that draws from her experiences as an undocumented person. It reimagines her parents’ precarious journey from China to Brazil to the United States and explores growing up in a Christian fundamentalist household. Lin’s poetry is written in a confessional style that blends intimate reflection with sharp observations about displacement and exile."
—Electric Literature

"In the end, what prevails in Lin’s work is a brilliance in making sense of what it means to be undocumented, and how these experiences have sharpened anyone who has lived through them. But it is also a bold meditation on what it means to be human and to live with loss amidst these scatterings, even when humanity itself is forcibly denied by the laws of a land."
—Hannah Chia, Singapore Unbound

"Cold Thief Place teaches us that place isn’t what we own but an emotional sphere that we dream to obtain."
—Tiffany Troy, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Esther Lin's Cold Thief Place... is a brilliant work that strives to teach us that a status does not erase the person it is attached to."
—Redlands Daily Facts

"Esther Lin’s Cold Thief Place is a testament to this kind of liberation through art—the ability to find oneself reflected in the canon and to, in turn, offer that visibility to others."
—Asa Drake, The Rumpus

"A Künstlerroman of cross-cultural and multigenerational scope, Lin’s debut has been anticipated by many—including me—for some time. To sit with Cold Thief Place is to appreciate why that has been the case; critically forceful yet never strident, deeply felt yet never self-indulgent, the book is an intimate document well deserving of wide public recognition."
—Christopher Kempf, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The people inhabiting Esther Lin’s poems have been handed a map that details the path to the most splendid home. But the journey might be impossible. Though they travel with care and attention, though they find places to settle along the way, the subjects of Cold Thief Place keep searching for a place where there is comfort and restful love. These heartrending poems are full of grief and struggle, but they hold the spark of all the possibilities available in our most dearly-held dreams. A gorgeous and timely book.”
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

"Even if it were pure story, an autobiography narrated like any other, it’d be worth seeking out Cold Thief Place, Esther Lin’s first full-length collection."
—Christopher Spaide for Literary Hub

"The composed tonal realm of Cold Thief Place, with all the distances collapsed and achieved, is one that strives toward a more sensitive perception of oneself and the lives of others. As Lin writes, “I see her best // when she’s half-hidden.” This is a refreshing debut, one that reasserts a place for the nuances of control in a contemporary poetry landscape that too often privileges its opposite: the ecstatic, the wild, the righteous."
—Corey Van Landingham, West Branch

“Esther Lin’s Cold Thief Place is a stunner, filled with poems that are as poignant as they are defiant, as quietly mournful as they are thrillingly untamed. Lin is a major new talent, yet she sings—of family, of love, and of her life as an undocumented American—with all the wisdom and skill of a very old soul. This is a fabulous debut.”
—Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine

"Esther Lin's Cold Thief Place is truly a once-in-a-lifetime revelation. I am changed, I am a better human being after reading these precise and poignant poems. This book is not only a timeless and necessary addition to immigrant literature around the world, but an automatic induction into the American canon."
—Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied and Solito: a Memoir