to form the Sister Spit imprint. From 2012 to 2015, Tea wrote a column for XOJane, where she chronicled the difficulties she faced in trying to have a baby with her partner, Dashiell. Her articles documented the stress and difficulty that accompanied fertility treatments and artificial insemination, and additionally illuminated gaps that existed for queer couples in a system that was created with heterosexual couples in mind. In 2016, she created Amethyst Editions, an imprint of Feminist Press. Tea stepped outside her work as a writer to serve as the Executive Producer of Valencia: The Movie. Based on her novel of the same name, the experimental film was spearheaded with filmmaker Hilary Goldberg. Valencia was filmed by 20 different lesbian, queer and trans directors, each assigned a different chapter of her novel. The twenty one different 'Michelle' characters "vary in age, gender, size, ethnicity, style and era". Her experiences trying to conceive and preparing for parenthood led her to start the website Mutha Magazine, an alternative mothering/parenting website that caters to those parents that do not identify with mainstream parenting media. Of the project she says "I think there are a lot of women who get pregnant and have babies but they're not part of this cultural traditional ideas of what it means to be a mom and they're not interested in the media that's already out there." In 2018, Against Memoir was published by Feminist Press. Academics In February 2008, Tea was the 23rd Zale Writer-in-Residence at the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College Institute at Tulane University. She did not go to college and, in interviews, has discussed the assumption that she has studied. Critical acclaim In February 2019, Michelle won the PEN / Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for Art of the Essay for her book Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions, and Criticisms! (Feminist Press, May 2018). While touring together in the year 2000, Tea and writer Clint Catalyst came up with the idea to solicit first-person narratives for their 2004 anthology, Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache. Described by Publishers Weekly as a "celebrat[ion of] the avant-garde," the book, which includes work by JT Leroy, Dennis Cooper, and Eileen Myles, reached #10 on the Los Angeles Times non-fiction paperback bestseller list in its first week of release. Moreover, the book was a 2004 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the Anthologies/Fiction category. Her books have often been nominated in the competition, beginning with