DONATO MANCINI & SHIN YU PAI

@7:30 pm

Subtext continues its monthly reading series with readings by DONATO MANCINI & SHIN YU PAI at Chapel Performance Space as part of the Wayward Music Series on the 1st of October 2008. Donations for admission will be taken at the door on the evening of the performance. The reading starts at 7:30pm.

DONATO MANCINI is author of two books of poetry Ligatures (2005; shortlisted for a ReLit award) and Æthel (2007), both from New Star Books.

Long after his first published poem "Empty Page" appeared in the second-last issue of The Canadian Forum (1920 - 2000), Donato started his real writing life as a full-time contributor to classical music division of allmusic.com (then called allclassical.com). Over the course of 2.6 years, he sold allclassical.com at least 685 entries about pre-Baroque and 20th century music, at 5 to 10 cents per word.

In the time since, Mancini has published numerous chapbooks, including Tribute to a Remarkable Cat/Two Hearts Beat as One (Access 2002), 9-11/7-Eleven (Open Space 2004), Floating World (Burning Cradle 2004), Causal Talk: Interviews with 4 Canadian Poets (above/ground press 2004), and no.22 in the "Hell Passport" series published by Perro Verlag (2007).

His own artworks have appeared variously in almost all of the artist-run centres around Vancouver, most notably Surveillance Sketch at Artspeak in August 2003, first of the gallery's now-annual windowfront exhibitions. A member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective since June 2003, he has created and edited an archival website to house audio recordings and documents from the KSW stretching back to 1985. He is now also editor of the Canadian section of the Electronic Poetry Center, with Meredith Quartermain.

In a previous life, Donato studied art history and music composition with Christopher Butterfield and Michael Longton at the University of Victoria, where Butterfield often enough gave live performances of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate as his lessons. An English Literature MA student as Simon Fraser University, Donato is at work on a study of the ideolect of poetry reviews in Canada since 1961.

SHIN YU PAI is the author of Haiku Not Bombs (Brooklyn 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 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.

THANKS to WAYWARD MUSIC SERIES, NONSEQUITUR and POETS & WRITERS for co-sponsoring this event.