Jack Straw SoundPages

Multidisciplinary writer and artist Shin Yu Pai, known primarily for her poetry, worked on a collection of personal essays about her relationship to Taiwanese identity during her time as a 2016 Jack Straw Writer. She talks with curator Karen Finneyfrock about her writing and research practices, and why she chose to explore these particular themes in the form of essays. “This particular project is one for me that explores cultural roles, gender roles, and my relationship to family in terms of my relationship with my father . . . as well as my relationship to my son.”

Shin Yu is a poet and essayist. She studied creative writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She is the author of several poetry collections including AUX ARCS (La Alameda), Adamantine (White Pine), Sightings (1913 Press), and Equivalence (La Alameda). Her personal essays have appeared in Tricycle, YES! Magazine, and City Arts. In 2015, she was a Jack Straw artist in residence for her public poetry project HEIRLOOM, which was installed in Piper’s Orchard in Carkeek Park. Shin Yu has received grants from the Awesome Foundation, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture for her work. Presently the Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond, she lives in Bitter Lake, Seattle, with her husband and son.

SoundPages was produced by Jack Straw Cultural Center as part of the Jack Straw Writers Program. All of the writers heard in this series are published in the Jack Straw Writers Anthology, and featured online at www.jackstraw.org.

Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.

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