Shin Yu Pai
Shin Yu Pai, born in 1975, is a second-generation Taiwanese-American poet and photographer. She grew up in Southern California and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with additional graduate level studies conducted at the Naropa Institute where she received the Hiro Yamagata and Zora Neale Hurston Scholarships.
Shin Yu Pai is the author of Haiku Not Bombs (Booklyn Artists Alliance), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks), Sightings: Selected Works [2000-2005] (1913 Press), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed)), Equivalence (La Alameda), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books). Her work is anthologized in America Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press) and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom Publications).
In addition to her work as a poet, Shin Yu has exhibited her visual work at The Paterson Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, and The Three Arts Club of Chicago. She has collaborated with individual artists and groups as diverse as Hedwig Dances and the Hudson Exploited Theater Company.
Shin Yu Pai has taught poetry at Southern Methodist University, The University of Texas at Dallas, The Writers Garret, Gemini Ink, Inkberry, The Poetry Center of Chicago and Grub Street, and served as the 2004 Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon College. She has completed residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Taipei Artist Village.
The editor of The Wisdom Anthology, Andrew Schelling, situates a series of poems “Yes Yoko Ono” by Shin Yu Pai under the category of “mind-cracking paradoxes or illogical formulations of Zen koan literature.” Schelling then uses her poems as a bridge, by way of similitude, to classical Chinese influences on American poetics.
Currently, Shin Yu Pai lives with her husband in Seattle where she is pursuing graduate work in Sociocultural Anthropology and Museology at The University of Washington. Her current book project, Adamantine, is a collection of poems which examines the strength of stone and the human spirit’s ability to transform itself through adversity.