SIMON SHIEH

Hometown: Hyde Park, New York

PiA fellowship position: China Foreign Affairs University, Beijing, China (2015)

University: BA at San Diego State University

Current city: Washington, D.C.

On a Monday afternoon in Washington, D.C., Simon Shieh is walking his dog Mowgli, whom he rescued from the streets of Beijing. The 29-year-old poet says walking is how he does “most of my writing these days” and his way of decompressing after a long day of teaching high school English in Falls Church, Virginia. In August, Simon began teaching 9th and 10th graders. They’re reading one of his favorite writers, Elizabeth Acevado, and her young adult novel The Poet X widely across international publications, including in Best New Poets 2020 and Narrative Magazine. A past nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Simon says it wasn’t until he moved back to Beijing as a PiA Fellow that he began to take himself seriously as a poet. In the sprawling metropolis, Simon found a community of other writers. Evenings after work were spent trawling Beijing’s hutong bars like Mado Bar and the Bookworm where artists would come together for poetry slams and other literary events. He even met his fiancée at a poetry reading there. “Those two years were really great for the literary community,” Simon says about 2015 to 2017. “After that things started to get more strict and it became harder for foreigners to gather and for places to hold events. But that time was really important for me as a writer.”

This fall was Simon’s first time teaching in an American high school after spending the last six years teaching in Beijing. Though Simon was born in Hyde Park, New York, he spent his teenage years in Beijing when his family moved there.

In 2016, he co-founded Spittoon, a magazine which translated contemporary Chinese fiction writers and poets into English. After finishing up his teaching fellowship, Simon continued melding his passion for teaching and mentoring and the arts. In 2017, he was tapped by an education company to build InkBeat Arts, a literary magazine for high school students in Beijing. He hosted creative writing workshops for students, held contests, and worked with the students to produce a literary journal. He says that experience was a “springboard” in helping him become a teacher full time.

When Simon became a PiA Fellow in 2015, he was hesitant about returning to the place where he grew up. But when he touched down in Beijing he says, “I really felt like I had come home.” Simon taught English and writing for two years at the China Foreign Affairs University. He worked with students to write about current events and literature. Working as a teacher not only satiated Simon’s desire to help students express themselves, it was also a fitting schedule for his life as a burgeoning poet. “I kind of romanticize that period of my life,” Simon says. “When I wasn’t teaching I would sit on my balcony and look out at a bunch of trees. I’d read and write for hours and go out to poetry readings and watch other people read in the evenings.”

Simon was recently awarded the Poetry Foundation’s prestigious Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a $25,800 prize given to five emerging poets for their creative pursuits. Simon’s poetry has appeared

Simon returned to the U.S. in June of this year after spending another two years teaching at Beijing World Youth Academy. He says the adjustment back to the U.S. has been challenging with the pandemic. In Beijing, Simon’s school hardly shifted to online teaching; but in the U.S., he has had to adapt to a mix of both online and in-person classes.

Even still, Simon’s current life in the U.S. capital isn’t too dissimilar from his one in Beijing. When classes are over, Simon still goes for long walks, attends literary events, and spends stretches of time devouring the words of his poetic influences – the works of Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong and Louise Glück. Currently, Simon is working on his first manuscript – a book that interrogates the trauma that men inflict on boys and what he calls “the cult of masculinity.” He says a large part of his inspiration for this work comes from his martial arts training. In the next year, Simon hopes to pursue an MFA in Poetry and is itching to return to Asia.