Dear Friends,

After three years of making Ten Thousand Things with KUOW Public Radio, the station has decided to not renew my show.

Ten Thousand Things was a love letter to the Asian American community, created at a time when there was a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes when all the stories about Asian Americans in the media somehow felt like they were about  harm and loss. Just this Fall, the Asian American Foundation released a survey on public safety conducted in Seattle, where 2 in every 5 Asian Americans reported being the victim of an ant-Asian experience, with 3 in 5 reporting feeling unsafe in public settings. In the face of these kinds of statistics, the incoming political regime, and the lived experiences of the Asian American community, Ten Thousand Things and its stories feels more necessary than ever.

Over its 3-year run, the show won awards from the Asian American Podcasters Association, The Signal Awards, and The Edward R. Murrow Awards. We were funded by The Common Counsel Foundation and received an inaugural Hope Corps Grants from Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture. I also designed a talk about Ten Thousand Things for Humanities Washington which is regularly requested by libraries, schools, and cultural organizations around the State of Washington.

I own the IP for Ten Thousand Things and will be taking it with me and raising funds to produce it independently. In 2025, there will be a revival of interest in the show as The Wing Luke Museum mounts an exhibition on objects from Ten Thousand Things, and University of Washington Press brings out a book about the show. I’m hoping to have a new season ready to launch in time for these milestones and to potentially spend the next year producing some live shows for Ten Thousand Things and to continue gathering stories from the community. For me, Ten Thousand Things has always been an anti-racist project about narrative change with a deep commitment to the art and poetry of storytelling. In this next iteration of the show, I hope to go back to making it as weird and delightful as possible, with elements of high and low culture, and deep emotional complexity.

If the show has been meaningful to you, I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to write to [email protected] with your feedback on the show’s cancellation. KUOW reads every piece of audience feedback that it receives and shares it at their staff meetings. 

If you’d like to invest in the future of the show, the project is fiscally sponsored through Shunpike and accepts donations, which are fully tax deductible. If you are considering making any year-end charitable donations, I hope you’ll consider making a gift this year to support Ten Thousand Things and sharing this ask with others.

Thank you for your support. 

Shin Yu 

Jaipur Literary Festival has expanded outside of India and has been producing satellite literary festivals all over America. One of them came to Seattle where I presented my work as part of a panel with Vijay Seshadri. Thanks to Amber Flame for facilitating the conversation.

Seattle City of Literature hosted a recent panel at the Nordic National Museum with visiting Icelandic crime fiction writers Ragnar Jonasson and Yrsa Sigurðardóttiron and me and Melanie Noel on how literature shapes place. The mayor of Reykjavik, Einar Porsteinsson also joined us. Grateful to Stesha Brandon for getting us together.

I had a wonderful time in September at the Outsider Festival in Ostuni, Italy, an event which was founded by Bolivian poet Norah Zapata-Prill. We read in public plazas, schools, a library, a cemetery, and many historic places with poets from Italy, France, Argentina, Bolivia, and me representing the U.S. Many new friends were made and I am grateful for the warmth and kindness of the Italian people.

The Poetry Society of America has awarded me with the 2024 Shelley Memorial Award, an award given by nomination to one poet a year for poetic genius. This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me in my 26 years of writing and publishing poetry. I share this prize with my artist mother, Noko Pai, and with all the small press publishers that ever believed in my work: La Alameda Press, 1913 Press, Press Lorentz, Convivio Bookworks, Booklyn Artists Alliance, Blue Cactus Press, and Empty Bowl.

My show Ten Thousand Things won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award!

My Poetry in Public campaign got some local attention from:

KUOW
Seattle Magazine
Northwest Asian Weekly
South Seattle Emerald
Crosscut

Thanks to the good folx at Seattle Channel for covering my National Poetry Month campaign.

For this poetry display at Friends of Little Saigon, my designer Jayme Yen chose a typeface created by a Vietnamese font designer which pairs visually well with the Vietnamese language. Bryna Antonia Cortes sent a wonderful poem about the neighborhood of Little Saigon that we asked if we could translate into Vietnamese. Her grandfather did the translation and it is the only poem in the public poetry campaign that appears in two languages.