Rose of No Man's Land (2006) -- Finalist 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
Fourteen-year-old Trisha Driscoll is a self-described loner whose family expects nothing from her. While her mother lies on the couch in a hypochondriac haze and her sister aspires to be on The Real World, Trisha struggles to find her own place among the neon signs, theme restaurants, and cookie-cutter chain stores of her hometown.

Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person (2004), co-edited with Clint Catalyst -- Finalist, 2004 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction Anthologies
In this gritty, confessional memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts—a place where time and hope are spent on things not getting any worse. Tea’s girlhood is shaped by the rough fabric of the neighborhood and by its characters—the soft vulnerability of her sister Madeline and her quietly brutal Polish father; the doddering, sometimes violent nuns of Our Lady of Assumption; Marisol Lewis from the projects by the creek; and Johnna Latrotta, the tough-as-nails Italian dance-school teacher who offered a slim chance for escape to every young Chelsea girl in tulle and tap shoes. Told in Tea’s trademark loose-tongued, lyrical style, this memoir both celebrates and annihilates one girl’s tightrope walk out of a working-class slum and the lessons she carries with her. With wry humor and a hard-fought wisdom, Tea limns the extravagant peril of a dramatic adolescence with the private, catastrophic secret harbored within the walls of her family’s home—a secret that threatens to destroy her family forever.

Rent Girl (2004) by Michelle Tea and Laurenn McCubbin (Illustrator) -- Finalist Lambda Literary 2004 LGBT Autobiography/Memoir Awards and Lambda Literary Award for Photography/Visual Arts Awards
Publishers Weekly called Michelle Tea "a modern-day Beat, a kind of pop ambassador to the world of the tattooed, pierced, politicized and sex-radical queer-girls of San Francisco. [She] dramatizes the hopes and hurts, apathies and ambitions of young lesbians looking for love in the Mission District." Rent Girl continues Tea's graphic and uncompromising autobiographical bender, telling the story of her years as a prostitute, with provocative and richly illustrated work by Laurenn McCubbin.

The Beautiful: Collected Poems (2004) -- Finalist, 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
Before penning her contemporary classic Valencia, Tea wrote wonderfully honest narrative poems, which she self-published in small editions, now collected here for the first time. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2004 and a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (2004)
While many recent books have thoughtfully examined the plight of the working poor in America, none of the authors of these books is able to claim a working-class background, and there are associated methodological and ethical concerns raised when most of the explicatory writing on how poverty affects women and girls is done by educated, upper-class journalists. It was these concerns that prompted indie icon Michelle Tea-whose memoir, The Chelsea Whistle, details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts-to collect these fierce, honest, tender essays written by writers who can't go home to the suburbs when their assignment is over. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from stealing and selling blood to make ends meet; to "jumping" class; how if time equals money, then being poor means waiting; surviving and returning to the ghetto; and how feminine identity is shaped by poverty. Contributors include Daisy Hernandez, Diane Di Prima, Dorothy Allison,  Eileen Myles, Frances Varian, Shawna Kenney, Siobhan Brooks, Terri Griffith, Terry Ryan, and more.

Best Lesbian Erotica 2004 (2003) with Tristan Taormino
Best Lesbian Erotica 2004 journeys into the world of lesbian sex with uncommon, edgy stories that push lesbian lust and desire to new heights. This year's stories are selected by award-winning author Michelle Tea, whose gritty, personal writing has earned her top accolades.

The Chelsea Whistle (2002) - Finalist, 2002 Lambda Literary Award for Autobiography/Memoir
Tracks author's escape from the working-class slum of Chelsea Massachusetts.

Valencia (2000) - Winner, 2000 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
Valencia is the fast-paced account of one girl's search for love and high times in the drama-filled dyke world of San Francisco's Mission District. Through a string of narrative moments, Tea records a year lived in a world of girls: there's knife-wielding Marta, who introduces Michelle to a new world of radical sex; Willa, Michelle's tormented poet-girlfriend; Iris, the beautiful boy-dyke who ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama; and Iris's ex, Magdalena Squalor, to whom Michelle turns when Iris breaks her heart. Valencia conveys a blend of youthful urgency and apocalyptic apathy.

The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America (1998)
Passionate Mistakes charts the turbulent adventures of one girl in America from Boston's teenage goth world to whoring in New Age Tucson to arriving in San Francisco's dyke underground. Honest, sarcastic, lyrical and direct, Tea's work is the most literate and sophisticated treatment of these subjects to date. She's a reincarnated jill johnston from when jill johnston used to be cool.

Bottoms Up (2004), Eileen Myles, ed.
A collection of writing about desire. The stories are not straight-up sexual narrations but pieces, poems, and stories that explore the concept and manifestation of desire itself. Rather than merely describing the physical acts of sex, these writings limn the impetus, experiences, thoughts, and feelings that drive desire. The stories in the collection are varied but share a fascination with breaking down conventional conceptions of gender in favor of a wider view of sexuality. They include an examination of iconoclastic sexuality (musing on what it would be like to have sex with James Dean and like James Dean), finding the apex of desire in Lenny Kaye's sweat-soaked leather pants after a Patti Smith Group show, genderqueer cruising, the connection between sex and loss, and more. Contributors include Patrick Califia, Eileen Myles, Michelle Tea, Red Jordan Arobateau, Lori Selke, Victoria Brownworth, and Robert Glück.