Alex Kuo has lived most of his adult life in Idaho and Washington, with sabbaticals made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington State Arts Commission, Idaho Commission on the Arts, United Nations Artists Program, Rockefeller Foundation, Lingnan Foundation, and Fulbright Program. Cadenzas is his accumulation of more than eighty years of living, listening and writing on several continents and breathing in the cadences of several languages, including three Chinese dialects.