Jay Gao is a poet and the author of Imperium (Carcanet Press, 2022). He is a Contributing Editor at The White Review. Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, he earned his MFA at Brown University and is a PhD student at Columbia University in New York City where he studies Asian American poetry, experimental poetics, and race. 

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He is also the author of three poetry pamphlets: TRAVESTY58 (2022); Katabasis (2020), a winner of a New Poets Prize; and Wedding Beasts (2019), shortlisted for the Saltire-Calum MacDonald Award.  

 

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. During his MFA in Poetry at Brown University he received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing, the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, and the Feldman Prize in Fiction. 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 Tin House Winter Resident.

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He is represented by Matthew Turner at Rogers, Coleridge & White.