Kaitlin Solimine has called China a second home for nearly two decades, as well as Los Angeles, Costa Rica, France, Singapore, and most recently, San Francisco. Her early academic pursuits included a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies at Harvard University, where she was a Harvard-Yenching scholar at Beijing University, and wrote and edited the travel guide, Let’s Go: China (St. Martin’s Press).

In 2006-2007, she was a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Creative Arts Fellow in China where she began work on her debut novel, Empire of Glass, completed as her MFA thesis at UC-San Diego. Published in 2017, Empire of Glass was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Firecracker Awards for Independent Literature, and the Eyelands Book Awards.

She has been the recipient of several awards and residencies for her writing, including the Donald E. Axinn Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program award judged by Colson Whitehead, a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, and a writing fellow at the SF Writers’s Grotto and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. As a panelist, she has spoken at a range of events, including the Singapore Writers Festival, Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival, The Shanghai Literary Festival, Literary Orange, SF Litquake, and more.

Her writing has been published in National Geographic News, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Guernica Magazine, LitHub, MomEggReview, Kartika Review, The Huffington Post, The World of Chinese Magazine, China Daily, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and numerous anthologies.

Her written work centers around environmental and sustainability issues, travel and exploration, expatriate culture, US-China relations, childbirth, motherhood, and midwifery.

She is the co-founder of HIPPO Reads and the mother of three young children who simultaneously keep her young and age her quickly. She’s at work on a new(ish) novel, The Blue Lobster, that challenges conceptions of motherhood, birth, narrative form, and environmental collapse. She is a columnist for Motherscope and at work on a collection of essays about home, birth, and parenting.

In 2022, she launched The Postpartum Production Podcast, a hosted conversation about postpartum and creative practice, and how we can redefine what is seen as productive in caregiving and art.

Kaitlin was raised in New Hampshire, the unceded land of N’dakinna, which is the traditional ancestral homeland of the Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki Peoples past and present. She acknowledges and honors with gratitude the land and waterways and the alnobak (people) who have stewarded N’dakinna throughout the generations.

She currently lives in San Francisco, where she occupies the unceded Ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula.