Michel Lee Garrett (“me-shell” // she/her) has worked as an investigative reporter, the communications director of a U.S. senate campaign, the chair and comms leader of a small advocacy-focused LGBT+ nonprofit, and the speechwriter to the president of a major research university.

She is:

• the author of Born a Ramblin’ Man: Fourteen Tales of Thieves, Killers, Vagabonds and Lost Souls(Shotgun Honey, 2025)

• the editor of Transcendent Love: True Stories of T4T Relationships, a collection of essays from trans writers around the world (JKP Books, forthcoming)

• the editor of Burning Down The House: Crime Fiction Incited by the Songs of the Talking Heads(Shotgun Honey, 2024)
  

Her fiction often plays with humor while using genre to explore how inequitable systems manufacture injustice and how life is an act of rebellion against the absurd. Her poetry often meditates on her queerness, transness, and her complex relationship with her upbringing and her rural connections. When she’s not writing, she’s been seen at No Kings rallies giving speeches to thousands, at the steps of the PA capitol speaking at the first statewide LGBT+ rally in over decade (that she helped co-plan), and at the front rows of her local punk shows, Penn State women’s hockey games, and local independent pro wrestling matches.

Michel lives in Central Pennsylvania with her wife and two kids, where she’s part of a joyous two-household blended family.

Things people have called Michel
(not under duress, she promises)

“Not only a brilliant writer, but an important one.”
—Libby Cudmore, award-winning author of Negative Girl and The Big Rewind

“A ferocious and talented writer.”
—James D.F. Hannah, Shamus Award-winning author of Behind the Wall of Sleep and Because the Night

“One of America’s up-and-coming great storytellers.”
—T. Fox Dunham, author of The Street Martyr, Mercy, and Destroying the Tangible Illusion of Reality