Scott Ezell was born in Berkeley, California. He received a BA in English from UC Davis, studied Chinese at UC Berkeley, then entered the MA program in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. In 1992 he left graduate school to study Chinese language and literature in Taiwan, and lived a dozen years in Asia, working as a writer, editor, radio host, street musician, recording artist, and record producer. He also traveled widely in China, India, Japan, Indonesia, and other countries.
From 2002 – 2004 Scott Ezell lived with a community of aboriginal woodcarvers in Dulan Village, on the Pacific coast of Taiwan. There he rented an abandoned farmhouse and built a recording studio from driftwood and analog tape machines. In 2003 he produced the poetry-music-painting album Ocean Hieroglyphics, which was released internationally by Wind Records. His essay collection A Far Corner is a first-person account of life in a contemporary aboriginal community.
After traveling through Tibet and along the Silk Road to China’s border with Afghanistan, Scott Ezell returned to America in 2005 and began writing the book-length poem Petroglyph Americana. In 2006 he lived in Barcelona, working as a freelance writer and performing music with flamenco dancers in anarchy bars. In 2007 he was invited to participate in an artist residency at the Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia along with two aboriginal sculptors from Taiwan, and created the poem-painting series “Migration.” In 2008 he composed and performed music for the Stimulate modern dance company in Seattle, and wrote The End of China, a cultural travelogue of eastern Tibet and Xinjiang. His poem-painting series “Carbon Rings” was exhibited at the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle in September 2008.
Scott Ezell’s writing has appeared in the Kyoto Journal, Modern Chinese Poetics, the Taipei Times, Chan magazine, the Barcelona Metropolitan, and other publications. He has composed soundtracks for several films, and his music is available through Amazon, iTunes, other major distributors, and on his website. Ocean Hieroglyphics, a multi-genre project combining poems, paintings, photos, and music, has been re-issued as a book-CD package.
Scott Ezell lives in Seattle and Hanoi. In addition to writing the poem-cycle “Hanoi Rhapsodies,” he has recently performed improvised music with Vietnamese composer Vu Nhat Tan and recorded the album Where Will You Go When Your Heart is Free, a collection of love songs.
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