Shin Yu Pai

Shin Yu Pai is the author of several books of poetry, including Less Desolate (Blue Cactus, 2023), No Neutral (Empty Bowl, 2023), Virga (Empty Bowl, 2021), ENSŌ (Entre Ríos, 2020), Aux Arcs (La Alameda, 2013), Adamantine (White Pine, 2010), Sightings: Selected Works (2000-2005) (1913 Press, 2007)), and Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003). She served as the fourth poet laureate of the City of Redmond, Washington, from 2015 to 2017. She is a three-time fellow of MacDowell and has completed residencies at The Ragdale Foundation, Taipei Artist Village, Soul Mountain, and the National Park Service. She is a 2022 Artist Trust Fellow and was shortlisted in 2014 for a Stranger Genius Award in Literature. Her poetry films have screened at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin and Northwest Film Forum. Shin Yu is the creator and host of Ten Thousand Things, a podcast on Asian American stories for KUOW, Seattle's NPR affiliate station. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and also studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.

Selected Publications

POETRY: “Mandarins,” Khôra

POETRY: “Superstitious Asians,” Hobart

POETRY: “Six Persimmons,” Poets.org

INTERVIEW: “Ten Questions for Shin Yu Pai,” Poets & Writers

INTERVIEW: “A Room of Her Own: The Bounds of Desire and Human Capacity,” Ms. Magazine

INTERVIEW: “The Song and the Silence: Talking with Shin Yu Pai,” The Rumpus

ESSAY: “Tiny Love Story: A Stud for My Husband,” New York Times Magazine

ESSAY: “Where I Go: The Headlands of Yehliu,” Zocalo Public Square

POETRY FILMS: "Tidal", "Have You Ever Tried to Bully a Wave" and "Starshine" with David Ian Bickley

PODCAST: Ten Thousand Things, KUOW/NPR.

SELECTED WORKS:

*Small Doses of Awareness*
Chronicle Books, 2024

*Ten Thousand Things*
KUOW / NPR, 2022, 2023

Topics addressed in readings:

Asian American identity
Place-based writing
Buddhist perspectives / engaged Buddhism
Social justice
Contemporary art/artists
Mothering

Sample workshop 1: Place-based writing

A workshop on writing grounded deeply in place. A writer does not have to be "of a place" to write from a place of connectedness to land or place. Shin Yu will share strategies for researching and thinking about the history of a place which can then inform the writing of contemporary poems that look at the way that a place has evolved over time, whether through development, gentrification, or climate change.

sample workshop 2: Writing and public art

Poetry lives off of the page in public art projects that can range from textual installations on a sidewalk or public space to murals incorporating words and fragments of language. Poems can even be designed to be projected onto walls in galleries and public spaces. So much is possible when bringing poems into a different environment or experience. In this workshop, we'll look at various ways in which poets and visual artists have incorporated text-based work into visual and public art projects. We'll talk about the skills, partners, and budgets needed to execute your ideas and dream big about your own public art projects.

testimonials

“VIRGA, Shin Yu Pai’s elegant eleventh collection of poems, is a crisp and intelligent response to recent and ancient history. In poems at once visionary and practical, VIRGA portrays Buddhist thought from lived experience, and demonstrates the everyday life of a poet who can see for herself in the “shafts of rain going sublime” the reality of being an Asian American woman in America today. This collection rediscovers who we are in an age when hate-crimes and terrorization destroy the lives of Asians and all people of color. Experiencing these poems, we witness Shin Yu Pai rise in and through the wearying atmosphere of the “dominant caste,” as historian Isabel Wilkerson calls white culture, to hold herself, her child, her community, in that sublime state that, within the Zen mind, arises “before touching the ground.””

— Michael Daley, publisher of Empty Bowl Books

“Virga, much like its namesake, evokes gentle gasps and realizations. Transforming Wordsworth’s “poetry is the reflection of spontaneous emotion recollected in tranquility,” Shin Yu Pai creates contemplation from strife. Her mastery is found with her careful placement of words and lines within stanzas, indicative of her experience having ten books published prior to Virga. Much like a wizened master, Pai opens with the poem “Empty Zendo” with its ending lines being: “more than ever I will practice / for as long as I am able.””

— San Francisco Book Review

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AVAILABLE FOR CONSULTATIONS:

Year-round - Minimum commitment is 3 hours

Full-length Book Manuscript
Chapbook Manuscript
Individual Poems/Pages
MFA Applications
1:1 Reading Lists and Discussion.

Please contact us through our inquiry form

Book Shin Yu today