John Yau is a poet and fiction writer who began writing reviews for Art in America in 1977. Since then, his reviews and essays have appeared in ARTnews, Artforum, BOMB, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. He was the arts editor for The Brooklyn Rail (2007–2011) before leaving to co-found the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend in 2012, where his reviews appear regularly. His monographs include Philip Taaffe (2018), Thomas Nozkowski (2017), Catherine Murphy (2016), Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert (2015), Joan Mitchell: Trees (2014), William Tillyer: Watercolours (2010), A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (2009), Wifredo Lam: Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work: 1961 – 1982 (2002), Dazzling Water, Dazzling Light: Pat Steir Paintings (2001), and A.R. Penck (1999). In addition to contributing an essay to the first monograph on the sculptor Richard Hunt, he has written  monographs on Liu Xiaodong and William Tillyer. 

As a poet and fiction writer, Yau has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Academy of American Poets, New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He was the 2018 recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize. His books of poetry include Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012) andBijoux in the Dark (2018). A selection of essays, Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign, was published in 2020.  He received a B.A. in English and American literature from Bard College (1972) and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College in 1977. He is a professor of critical studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.