Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His recent books include: Bark, Archive, Splinter (Out-Spoken Press, 2024) and Imperium (Carcanet, 2022). Imperium 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 four other poetry pamphlets and chapbooks. 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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His pamphlets and chapbooks include: Bark, Archive, Splinter (2024); TRAVESTY58: Lake Poems (2022); Katabasis (2020); and Wedding Beasts (2019). 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 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.