Black and white portrait of Shin Yu Pai. Copyright watermark, Arzente Fine Art 2019.

Shin Yu Pai

Shin Yu Pai is the creator and host of Ten Thousand Things, an award-winning podcast on Asian American stories that she produced from 2022 to 2024 for KUOW/NPR. The show was recognized by the Asian American Podcasters Association, The Signal Awards, and won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award. In 2023, Ten Thousand Things was named as one of the best podcasts of the year by Mashable. The show is now being independently produced by Wonder Media Network and is supported by the Common Counsel Foundation. In addition to her work as a podcast host, Shin Yu is a poet and received the 2024 Shelley Memorial Award for poetic genius from the Poetry Society of America and a Poets Laureate fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She served as the fourth Civic Poet of Seattle from 2023 to 2024, and was Poet Laureate of The City of Redmond from 2015 to 2017. Named as a Trailblazing Woman and one of Seattle’s Most Influential by Seattle Magazine, her literary archives are held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

Photo credit: Arzente Fine Art

2024 Jack Straw Alumni Poetry Series:

In a collection that is deeply occupied with the notion of voice and who gets to have it, Shin Yu Pai’s No Neutral reaches toward a more authentic and natural voice to represent the poet’s perspective in all its range and concerns.

Monuments for Men (Memory’s Vault), Fort Worden

I can’t deny that beauty is
here, when bullied by design

to turn my back to the bay
and enthrone myself beneath

the shelter, to face a single pale
stone, enshrined within a slab

mausoleum – the permanence
of rock is as persistent as the force

of men, it’s evident in the words
etched onto stone steles, hostile

architectures crafted by those
who saw themselves like gods

who coerced the eyes upward
to poles planted at the site,

that old trope of the man, &
his lover the sea, patiently waiting

for his return, I think why
not turn the gaze back on her

right now – the sea – we have
already seen all there is to see

2016 Writers Program

Artist Support Program 2015: Heirloom, a site-specific installation in Piper’s Orchard that includes an audio recording of a poem mixed with field recordings of the Orchard.

 

Sound Clips
  • Susie Kozawa in a dark space with two projection screens showing the interior of a wooden house. Susie appears on the lefthand screen, in the foreground.
    Tokio Florist Project New Media Gallery Podcast
  • Firstborn – Shin Yu Pai
  • Shin Yu Pai - Heirloom
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