Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His debut poetry collection Imperium (Carcanet Press, UK, 2022) is a winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His writing has received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Civitella Ranieri, Community of Writers, and he earned his MFA in Literary Arts (Poetry) from Brown University. Currently, he is a reader for Poetry magazine and a PhD student in English at Columbia University where he studies experimental poetics and race.

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He is also the author of five poetry chapbooks and pamphlets including: Bark, Archive, Splinter (forthcoming); TRAVESTY58 (2022); Katabasis (2020); and Wedding Beasts (2019). He is a winner of the 2022 Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction, the 2021 London Magazine Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. He was also a co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, a former reviewer for the Poetry Foundation, a mentor for the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics Programme, and a former Contributing Editor for The White Review. He is represented by Matthew Turner at RCW Literary Agency.