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, 2007), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz, 2006), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005), Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998).

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 MAC, 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.

She has taught poetry at Southern Methodist University, The University of Texas at Dallas,
The Writers Garret, Gemini Ink, Inkberry, The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 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, Taipei Artist Village, Ragdale Foundation, and Soul Mountain.

Shin Yu 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. Currently, she lives and works in Seattle.