Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in 1950 to Chinese emigrants, Yau attended Bard College and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978. His first book of poetry, Crossing Canal Street, was published in 1976. Since then, he has won acclaim for his poetry’s attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface. In poems that frequently pun, trope, and play with the English language, Yau offers complicated, and sometimes competing versions of the legacy of his dual heritages as Chinese/American, poet, and artist. Yau has received many honors and awards for his work, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French governement. Since 2004 he has been the arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail. He teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University, and lives in New York City. His most recent publication is Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012).