John Yau

John Yau

Photograph by Gloria Graham taken during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2003
Born June 5, 1950
Lynn, Massachusetts
Nationality United States
Genre Poetry, fiction, criticism, hybrid forms
Notable awards Academy of American Poets' Lavan Award
American Poetry Review's Jerome Shestack Prize Guggenheim Fellowship
Spouse Eve Aschheim
Children Cerise Yau

John Yau (born 1950) is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.

Life and career

According to Matthew Rohrer's profile on Yau from Poets & Writers Magazine,[1] Yau's parents settled in Boston after emigrating from China in 1949. His father was a bookkeeper.[2] As a child Yau was friends with the son of the Chinese-born abstract painter John Way. By the late 1960s Yau was exposed to, "a lot of anti-war poetry readings in Boston [and] so I'd heard Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell, people like that. I don't know - Robert Kelly (poet) just seemed a different kind of poet. Mysterious, in a way. He was interested in the occult, in gnosticism and abstract art - things that had a particular appeal to me."[3] According to Rohrer, Yau's decision to attend Bard College was motivated by his admiration of Kelly.

Yau's most recent books are "Egyptian Sonnets" (Rain Taxi, 2012), Exhibits (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (Distributed Art Publishers, 2009),[4] and The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2006). His collections of poetry include Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin, 2006), Ing Grish, with Paintings by Thomas Nozkowski (Saturnalia, 2005),Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin, 2002), Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow, 1996), Berlin Diptychon with Photographs by Bill Barrette (Timken, 1995), Edificio Sayonara (Black Sparrow, 1992),Corpse and Mirror (Holt & Rinehardt, 1983), a National Poetry Series book selected by John Ashbery, and Broken Off by The Music (Burning Deck, 1981). Artists' books include projects with Squeak Carnwath, Richard Tuttle, Norbert Prangenberg, Hanns Schimannsky, Archie Rand, Norman Bluhm, Pat Steir, Suzanne McClelland, Robert Therrien, Leiko Ikemura, and Jürgen Partenheimer (a.o.), his books of art criticism include The United States of Jasper Johns (1996) and In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (1993). He has also edited Fetish (1998), a fiction anthology.

Yau was the Arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail, from 2007-2011, but left to edit an online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend. He also runs a small press, Black Square Editions, which publishes translations, poetry, and fiction.[5] Yau currently teaches art history and criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.

Awards

Yau has received awards and grants from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, the Academy of American Poets (Lavan Award), The American Poetry Review (Jerome Shestack Award), the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the General Electric Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Selected bibliography

See also

References

  1. ↑ Poets and Writers Magazine (2002) 30:3 pp. 24-31
  2. ↑ Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 234: American Short Story Writers Since WWII, p. 307
  3. ↑ Reference required
  4. ↑ "John Yau in Conversation with Phong Bui". Brooklyn Rail. July–August 2009.
  5. ↑ http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/further-adventures-in-the-monochrome-a-conversation-with-john-yau

External links

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