August 18, 2016

Shin Yu Pai is the poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of eight books of poetry, including most recently Aux Arcs. Her work has appeared in publications throughout the United States, Japan, China, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Canada. She has been a featured presenter at the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival and the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival. Shin Yu has served as a poet-in-residence for the Seattle Art Museum and received grants from 4Culture and the City of Seattle for her work. Her MFA is from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and she also studied at Naropa University. Visit her website.

David Francis is an independent curator by trade. For the past two decades his poems have appeared in about a dozen literary journals including Art Access, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Verse, Poetry Northwest, and are forthcoming in Switched-on Gutenberg (one of the first Internet poetry journals). In 2010, the Center on Contemporary Art published his first book, Otherwise This Stone. He holds MFA and PhD degrees from University of Washington and taught in Poland and Hungary as a Fulbright scholar. He currently works as the public art coordinator for the City of Shoreline, Washington.