John Yau

John Yau, a poet, art critic, fiction writer, and publisher, was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on June 5, 1950. His father, a Chinese American bookkeeper, met his mother, who was descended from a prestigious Shanghai-based family, while living in China. Yau’s parents settled in Boston after emigrating from China in 1949. Yau studied at Boston University and received his BA from Bard College. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College.

In 1976, Yau published his first collection of poetry, Crossing Canal Street (Bellevue Press, 1976). Since then, he has published many books of poetry, including Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems, 1974–2024 (Omnidawn, 2025); Bijoux in the Dark (Letter Machine Editions, 2018); Exhibits (Letter Machine Editions, 2010); Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin, 2002); Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow Press, 1996); Berlin Diptychon (Timken, 1995); Edificio Sayonara (Black Sparrow Press, 1992); and Corpse and Mirror (Holt Rinehart, 1983); which was a National Poetry Series book selected by John Ashbery.

Yau’s books of art criticism include In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (Ecco, 1993); A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P., 1997); and The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He has also published a novel and edited Fetish (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998), a fiction anthology.

Yau has received numerous awards, including the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 2018 Jackson Poetry Prize, the American Poetry Review Jerome Shestack Award, and a 1988 New York Foundation for the Arts Award. He is also the recipient of a 1977 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowships, and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Yau was a distinguished visiting critic at the Pratt Institute Graduate School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts in the late 1980s. In 1992, he was a visiting poet at Brown University and in 1994 and 1995, was a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley. He was also the Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. From 2006 to 2011, Yau was the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail. He also founded the nonprofit press Black Square Editions and cofounded the online magazine Hyperallergic. Yau is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and lives in Beacon, New York.