Michelle Kuo was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to immigrants from Taiwan. She attended public schools from kindergarten through high school, and graduated with a degree in Social Studies and Gender Studies at Harvard College. In 2004, she joined Teach for America and moved to the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Michelle taught English at an alternative school for kids who were expelled from other schools.

At Harvard Law School, Michelle worked as a student attorney at the Criminal Justice Institute, a domestic violence and family mediation clinic, and the Education Law Clinic/Trauma Policy Learning Initiative, as well as a law clerk at The Door and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. A Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, Michelle received the National Clinical Association's award for her advocacy of children with special needs.

Following graduation, Michelle returned to rural Arkansas, working as a tutor in a county jail. This experience forms the heart of her book, READING WITH PATRICK, which explores racism, incarceration, and education in the Mississippi Delta. The book has been selected by community reads and first-year university and library programs across the country, including the Yale Prison Education Initiative, the University of Iowa, Washtenaw Reads, Oregon State, Lake Forest, Stanford, Saint Michael’s College, and Asian American reading groups.

Michelle worked as an immigrants' rights lawyer at Centro Legal de la Raza, located in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California. She advocated for tenants facing evictions, workers stiffed out of their wages, and families facing deportation. Supported by a Skadden Fellowship, Michelle's clients included day laborers, restaurant workers, and domestic workers.

Michelle has also clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan at the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit. Among the troubling cases that she worked on was U.S. v. Preston, in which the police coerced a confession from an 18 year old with severe disabilities who lived on a Native American reservation.

Michelle’s experiences working in incarcerated spaces have shaped her desire to help build a world without prison and detention. She has taught courses at San Quentin through the Prison University Project (the only college-degree granting program at a state prison in California), where she was inspired by the intellect and motivation of her students. Michelle has also volunteered at RAICES, a leading immigrants’ rights organization, preparing detained migrants for interviews with asylum officers. She has worked as a pro bono attorney for incarcerated clients through the Stanford Three Strikes Project, most recently with a client who was recently freed.

Michelle was previously an Associate Professor in the History, Law, and Society program at the American University of Paris. Along with Hannah Davis Taieb and Albert Wu (her husband, a historian of Europe and East Asia), Michelle designed a course that brought together traditional college students and incarcerated people at a local prison in Paris. Michelle and Albert have created the course “Practicing Democracy in Taiwan,” which culminated in a study trip to Taiwan; students learned from local activists, congressional members, indigenous student groups, and public historians on transitional justice. They also taught and designed a course on immigration justice. Under the supervision of RAICES, students helped detained migrants in south Texas apply for asylum. Michelle has won a number of teaching awards, including the Board of Trustees Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award (2017) at the American University of Paris and the Student Government Association’s teaching award (2018). Along with Hannah Taieb, Simone Davis, and Kassia Aleksic, she helped to start a nonprofit organization, Dialogue & Transformation, which works to create transformative conversations among formerly incarcerated people across the world.  

Michelle writes for public outlets, including the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, the Guardian, Paris Review, other publications.

READING WITH PATRICK was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice, it has been translated into Japanese and Mandarin, and released in the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. It has been a community reads pick at a number of libraries, colleges, and universities and recommended by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. As Pulitzer-Prize winning James Forman, Jr. and Arthur Evenchik write in The Atlantic, "Impassioned writing and hard-earned wisdom set the book apart ... In all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, there has been nothing quite like Reading with Patrick."   

Michelle currently lives in Taiwan, where she is a visiting professor at National Chengchi University and teaches at a juvenile detention facility. She co-writes a popular Taiwan-based weekly newsletter that explores politics, culture, and acts of creation and solidarity.