Shin Yu Pai is the creator, host, and writer behind Ten Thousand Things, an award-winning podcast that she made for three seasons with KUOW Public Radio/NPR and now makes independently with Acast Studios (Wonder Media Network). The show has won two Golden Crane awards from the Asian American Podcasters Association, Bronze and Silver Signal Awards, and a regional Edward R. Murrow Award, in addition to funding support from 4Culture, The Common Counsel Foundation, and an NEA Hope Corps grant from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture.
Mashable named Ten Thousand Things as one of the best podcasts of the year in 2023. In 2025, Shin Yu organized and curated an exhibition on Ten Thousand Things at The Wing Luke Museum (a Smithsonian Institution affiliate) which will be on display through January 2027. A book on Ten Thousand Things is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press in 2027.
As a public radio personality, Shin Yu has guest hosted and reported on arts and culture for KUOW’s Soundside podcast. Prior to working with KUOW, Shin Yu hosted the Lyric World podcast for Town Hall Seattle, a live event series and podcast focused on contemporary poetry, which was supported by The Satterberg Foundation. As an essayist, her stories have appeared in NYTimes, Tricycle Magazine, YES! Magazine, Off Assignment, Zocalo Public Square, Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, and more. She is the co-author of Small Doses of Awareness (Chronicle Books, 2024), a book on psychedelic microdosing.
In addition to her work as a non-fiction writer and audio storyteller, Shin Yu has published 11 books of poetry. In 2020, Entre Rios Books published Ensō, a 20-year survey and retrospective her work across creative disciplines. Shin Yu served as the Civic Poet for The City of Seattle from 2023 to 2024 and received a Poet Laureates Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for her work with community. Her poetry films have been shown at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin and around the world. In 2024, she received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America which is given for poetic genius.
She is a three-time fellow of MacDowell and has been a writer in residence at the Seattle Art Museum, Taipei Artist Village, Centrum Foundation, and Pacific Science Center. Shin Yu received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a Hiro Yamagata Fellow at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She also holds an MA in Museology from the University of Washington with a focus on oral history and community-based museums. She received a BA from Boston University in English, with minors in Eastern Religion and Spanish.
Named in 2024 as one of Seattle’s Most Influential people and a Trailblazing Woman by Seattle Magazine, Shin Yu’s literary archives were acquired by Yale University’s Beinecke Library in 2025.
