Kaitlin Solimine is a hyphnenate—novelist, mother of three, activist in birth/midwifery and public education, and a podcast host. She 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).
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, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, 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 mother of three young children who simultaneously keep her young and age her quickly. She’s at work on two new novels, Hanalei Bay: Or Variations on a Theme of Murakami, and The Blue Lobster, both works that challenge conceptions of motherhood, birth, late stage capitalism, narrative form, and environmental collapse. 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. Most recently, she has begun a Master’s in Social Work program and is working on grassroots activist strategies to increase public school enrollment and support.
