Timothy Yu is Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the poetry collection 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press), the Editor’s Selection in the 2014 NOS Book Contest. He is also the author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press), which won the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press), and he also serves as executive editor of the journal Contemporary Literature.

His poetry publications include two chapbooks, 15 Chinese Silences (Tinfish Press) and Journey to the West (Barrow Street), winner of the Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize from Kundiman. His poems have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Cordite, Mantis, SHAMPOO, Lantern Review, and Kartika Review. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Jacket, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Volta, Meanjin, and on CNN.com.

His new book, Diasporic Poetics, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, examines the emergence of “Asian” identities in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and explores how poets of Asian descent navigate these identities through poetic form. The poetry of writers such as Myung Mi Kim, Fred Wah, and Ouyang Yu often reflects movement across national borders, but also develops unexpected aesthetic connections that register local and global connections of race, ethnicity, and politics.

He earned his AB from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, and has previously taught at the University of Toronto.