Shin Yu Pai

Shin Yu Pai is currently Civic Poet of The City of Seattle. She is the 2024 recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Poets Laureate Fellowship from The Academy of American Poets. She is the author of 13 books, most recently No Neutral (Empty Bowl, 2023) and Less Desolate (Blue Cactus, 2023). From 2015 to 2017, she served as the fourth Poet Laureate of The City of Redmond. She has been recognized by Artist Trust, 4Culture, The City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, The Satterberg Foundation, and The Awesome Foundation. Her visual work has been exhibited at The Wing Luke Museum, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, The Paterson Museum, The American Jazz Museum, The Three Arts Club of Chicago, Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, and the International Print Center. She is a three-time fellow of MacDowell and has been a writer in residence for the National Park Service, Taipei Artist Village, Centrum Foundation, and Ragdale Foundation. Her video poems have screened at The Zebra Poetry Festival in Berlin and Northwest Film Forum. She is the creator and host of Ten Thousand Things, an award-winning, chart-topping podcast on Asian American stories that she writes and produces for KUOW, Seattle's NPR affiliate. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied also at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.