Timoth Liu: February Portrait of the Month

Timothy Liu, New York, NY, 1993

As an Asian American, gay man, and former Mormon, Timothy Liu’s poetry reveals the complex terms of his identity in an emotionally charged and often sexually explicit way. Of the imagery in his work, Liu has said, “Language is erotic, intended or not. […] Many of my poems seek to stage linguistic tropes and situations that have been largely left out of poetic discourse, thus releasing textual energies that our culture seeks to suppress.”

Liu was born in San Jose, California, in 1965 to Chinese immigrant parents. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles; Brigham Young University (B.A. in English); the University of Houston (M.A. in English); and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Giard’s portrait was made the year Liu’s first collection of poetry, Vox Angelica (1992), won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. His subsequent books of poetry include Say Goodnight (1998), a PEN Open Book Margins Award recipient; Of Thee I Sing (2004), which was chosen by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; For Dust Thou Art (2005); Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse (2009); and Polytheogamy (2009), an artist/poet collaboration that paired Liu’s poems with Greg Drasler’s paintings. Liu also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (2000). His latest compilation of poems, Don’t Go Back to Sleep, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was published in 2014.

His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review, among others. Liu’s journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. He is currently a professor of English at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ.