Amy Y.Q. Lin is a Chinese American writer. She writes literary and speculative fiction, drawing upon her experience as a software engineer. Her debut story can be found in Catapult, and her other work, in The Rumpus and One Story's blog. Her writing was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Sewanee Review fiction contest and has been supported by Tin House and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She lives in Seattle, where she is at work on her first novel.
She received her MFA in Creative Writing in 2025 from New York University, where she studied the craft of fiction with the greats: Jeffrey Eugenides, Garth Greenwell, Katie Kitamura, Raven Leilani, David Lipsky, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and Hannah Tinti.
At NYU, Amy was an adjunct professor in the English department. She recently taught an undergraduate course called "Introduction to Prose and Poetry," a combined creative writing workshop and craft class, to students of various disciplines and ages. She developed her syllabus (available upon request) around international 20th and 21st century writers and included a broad range of poetic forms and literary subgenres. By the end of the semester, students came away with a strong body of work for their writing portfolio, an new understanding of storytelling techniques, and the tools to critique future creative works with respect and professionalism. She has also taught classical piano repertoire and technique from her private studio and freelanced as a college admissions essay consultant.
In addition to her teaching expertise, Amy brings a wealth of experience in publishing, content marketing, and editorial roles: she was recently Senior Editor at a tech startup, authoring and editing articles for a highly regarded software development blog. Amy has served as Fiction Editor and Books Editor for the Washington Square Review, an award-winning literary magazine, where she managed a team of two editors and three assistant editors, solicited writers, curated short stories and book reviews for two print issues and the digital features section, and managed content reading, selection, assignment, editing, and publication schedules. She has also been a reader for One Story and Best of the Net.
Prior to writing, Amy was a software engineer in the video games industry, launching the Xbox Game Pass subscription and Xbox apps on PC and mobile. During her time at Microsoft, she drove performance improvements that significantly reduced app startup time, spearheaded a weekly livestream on the official Xbox channel on Twitch, and led DEI initiatives for Early in Career and AAPI communities. Amy also launched major revenue-driving experiences, including cloud streaming, third-party integrations with Ubisoft and EA, a new family subscription type, and the global expansion of Game Pass to Southeast Asian markets. She has engineering experience in web, PC and mobile app development using React, React Native, TypeScript, and Redux. She received her B.A. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
On the side, Amy has developed and published personal projects in artificial intelligence and virtual reality, including award-winning simulations, adversarial bots, and video games. At the Riot Games Hackathon in 2017, her team's League of Legends home theater simulation won first place as a fresh visualization tool for advancing VR streaming entertainment. In 2017, Amy also created an AI solver to play Bananagrams and win the game faster than human opponents via the application of game tree search, randomized algorithms, and hill climbing. Her project received the Workday-sponsored award at Cornell University's cutting-edge technology showcase, BITS ON OUR MINDS (BOOM) 2018. In 2018 and 2016, Amy designed, engineered, and created the soundtrack for two games, Direkt and Fara Heim, puzzle games published on Kongregate and Newgrounds that she and her team evolved from player feedback and data analytics to improve level progression and player retention. In college, she worked in a cross-functional project team of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and software engineers on the development of a Star Wars rollercoaster VR simulation that integrated with a Moog motion platform, physical interactive models, and mobile app controllers to provide sensory feedback for real-world performance prediction.
Once upon a time, she was also a professional video game streamer.