Michelle Tea is the author of eleven books of poetry, memoir and fiction that explore the queer, feminist, working class experience in the United States. Her memoir Valencia is an underground classic, and was made into a collaborative feature film using the work of 21 queer filmmakers. Her latest, Black Wave, is an innovative hybrid of memoir and fiction which explores poverty, addiction and identity against a backdrop of environmental destruction. Tea has edited anthologies that affirm the power of both personal narrative and queer fiction, as well as collections that investigate the female experience of growing up working class and feminist investigations of fashion. For three years she blogged about her attempts to get pregnant on the popular XOJane.com blog Getting Pregnant with Michelle Tea.
She is founder and Editor-at-Large for Mutha Magazine, an online alternative parenting magazine. She founded the queer literary non-profit RADAR Productions, which she ran for thirteen years, and is also the founder of the infamous Sister Spit international feminist performance tour, which launched in the 90s and continues today under millennial management. The former editor of the Sister Spit publishing imprint at City Lights Books, she currently edits the Amethyst Edition series at Feminist Press.