Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Writing, Poetry, Short Film
Website: quinnedlin.com
Quinn Edlin is a writer, poet, and workshop facilitator based in Oakland, California. She began her practice at age fifteen through Youth Speaks, the San Francisco-based arts education organization that supports young writers and performers, going on to become a finalist in the Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam in 2019. Her debut chapbook, Thirsty Grace, was published in November 2019, establishing her as a distinctive voice in Bay Area spoken word and literary communities.
Edlin constructs auto/biographical narratives drawn from her experience as a queer, mixed Black woman, centering her work on the intersections of queerness, Blackness, and identity. She has facilitated teen poetry workshops at Berkeley High School, served on the Curatorial Board at Platform Artspace at the University of California, Berkeley, and contributed writing to publications including OFFICE magazine and Mala Forever. Her work has also appeared in Adidas’ 2020 Pride Story campaign.
In 2025, Edlin completed a residency at Bathers Library in Oakland, developing project UNBURDENED — a multi-installment project combining written, recorded, and photographed explorations of shame. The project culminated in a book release and short film screening at Bathers Library in December 2025, and work from the series was subsequently presented at ATRIUM art fair at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco in January 2026.
Edlin works across writing, spoken word, photography, and short film, often combining these forms within single projects. Her practice is grounded in autobiography and centers on questions of bodily autonomy, memory, and emotional labor — particularly shame, transformation, and the possibilities of queer and Black life. She has described her thematic focus as “the revolution of the Queer and Black/Brown body, and the world surrounding it,” and values work that simultaneously builds community and enables personal introspection.
Her approach to project UNBURDENED — interviewing subjects about moments of sincere shame, then presenting the conversations in written, audio, and photographic form — illustrates her interest in collaborative, multi-medium inquiry as a form of care and radical intimacy.
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