Shin Yu Pai

Shin Yu Pai is a poet, an essayist, a photographer and book artist, and a curator. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in museology from the University of Washington. Pai is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Aux Arcs (2013), Adamantine (2010), Works on Paper (2008), and Sightings: Selected Works (2000–2005) (2007). Her work has appeared internationally, in publications in the United States, Japan, China, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

Pai’s work frequently unfolds across different media to tell stories about history, landscape, and geography. Of the connection between photography and poetry, Pai says, “My visual work complements my writing in being another extension of the way in which I see and take in the world. I see them as very complementary vs. oppositional practices that help me to go to deeper places that I might not, if aided by only one medium.”

Pai is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop and the Motherload Collective and a founding editor of Lawrence & Crane Publications. Her poetry has twice been commissioned by the Dallas Museum of Art, and her visual work has been exhibited at various galleries and museums, including the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, the Paterson Museum, the American Jazz Museum, and the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. She has been writer-in-residence at the Seattle Art Museum and in 2014 was nominated for a Stranger Genius Award. Currently, Pai is poet laureate of Redmond, Washington.