Xiao Yue Shan is a poet born in Dongying, China and living on Vancouver Island. The chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love, won the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in 2019. The full-length collection, Then Telling Be the Antidote, won the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in 2022. Poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, Artlyst, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Ambit, and more. Poem-films have shown in festivals in London, Vienna, and New York. She runs the Beijing-based bilingual literary journal Spittoon, edits Tokyo Poetry Journal, and is the poetry editor for the Hong Kong-based journal, Cicada. Her website is shellyshan.com
At NES, she is continuing the project SEA-SIGHT (working title), a collection of photographs and poems written along the two mirroring coastlines of the Pacific Ring of Fire: that of Honshu (Japan) and Vancouver Island (Canada). Using historic methods of cartography and wayfinding, as well as contemporary ideologies of psychogeography and the art of attention, she aims to create a series, inherited from the ideas of SEA-SIGHT, of how intelligence and poetics can better intersect with ideas of placeness, so that we may approach the world we live in with not a sense of conquering, but a sense of variance, curiosity, and mutuality.