Michelle Kuo is an author and educator. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to immigrants from Taiwan, she attended public schools from kindergarten through high school and graduated with a degree in Social Studies and Gender Studies at Harvard College. In 2004, she joined Teach for America and moved to the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Michelle taught English at an alternative school for kids who were expelled from other schools.

At Harvard Law School, Michelle worked as a student attorney at the Criminal Justice Institute, a domestic violence and family mediation clinic, and the Education Law Clinic/Trauma Policy Learning Initiative, as well as a law clerk at The Door and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. A Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, Michelle received the National Clinical Association's award for her advocacy of children with special needs.

Following graduation, Michelle returned to rural Arkansas, working as a tutor in a county jail. This experience forms the heart of her book, READING WITH PATRICK, which explores racism, incarceration, and education in the Mississippi Delta. The book has been selected by numerous community reads and first-year university and library programs across the country. The runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice, it has been released in the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. As Pulitzer-Prize winning James Forman, Jr. and Arthur Evenchik write in The Atlantic, "Impassioned writing and hard-earned wisdom set the book apart ... In all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, there has been nothing quite like Reading with Patrick."    

Michelle worked as an immigrants' rights lawyer at Centro Legal de la Raza, located in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California. She advocated for tenants facing evictions, workers stiffed out of their wages, and families facing deportation. Supported by a Skadden Fellowship, Michelle's clients included day laborers, restaurant workers, and domestic workers.

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Michelle has worked to protect the rights of undocumented immigrants, assist asylum seekers, and defend incarcerated people. She has taught in prisons in the United States, France, and Taiwan. Michelle is interested in literacy, racial and socioeconomic equality, and abolitionist approaches towards prison and detention. Michelle has also volunteered at RAICES, a leading immigrants’ rights organization, preparing detained migrants for interviews with asylum officers. Michelle also has clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan at the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit.

Michelle writes for public outlets, including the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, the Paris Review, and the Guardian. She and her husband Albert Wu also write a popular Taiwan-based weekly newsletter, A Broad and Ample Road, that explores politics, culture, and acts of creation and solidarity.

Michelle currently lives in Taiwan. She’s the editor-in-chief of Books from Taiwan, and works to bring Taiwan’s children books and comic books to the world. She also is an associate visiting professor at National Chengchi University and has taught at a women’s juvenile detention facility in collaboration with the National Central Library. Michelle also is the co-founder and vice president of Dialogue and Transformation, a nonprofit that seeks to create transformative conversations and connections among prison educators, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and advocates for social justice.

Previously, Michelle was an Associate Professor at the American University of Paris. She has won numerous awards for her teaching, including the 2016 Board of Trustees Award for Teaching at the American University of Paris.

As Michelle puts it in the New York Times, her book is an "intimate story about the failure of the education and criminal justice systems and the legacy of slavery; about how literature is for everyone, how books connect people, and the hope that with enough openness and generosity we can do the hard work of knowing each other and ourselves."