Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in the Ear, Thriving Slumber is forthcoming in Fall 2026 from Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. His debut collection Imperium (Carcanet, 2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. He is also the author of five other poetry pamphlets and chapbooks. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. ​​

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His pamphlets and chapbooks include: Bark, Archive, Splinter (2024) and Bark, Archive, Splinter (2024). His writing has received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Civitella Ranieri, Community of Writers, Kenyon Review, and he earned his MFA in Literary Arts (Poetry) from Brown University. 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 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.