According to Matthew Rohrer's profile on Yau from Poets and Writers Magazine , Yau's parents settled in Boston after emigrating from China in 1949. His father was a bookkeeper. Yau characterizes his father as an outsider - "My father was half English and half Chinese [...] so he never fit in." As a child Yau was friends with the son of the Chinese-born abstract painter John Way. By the late 1960s Yau was exposed to, "a lot of anti-war poetry readings in Boston [and] so I'd heard Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell, people like that. I don't know - Robert Kelly just seemed a different kind of poet. Mysterious, in a way. He was interested in the occult, in gnosticism and abstract art - things that had a particular appeal to me." According to Rohrer, Yau's decision to attend Bard College was motivated by his admiration of Kelly.

Yau's most recent books are Exhibits (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P., 2009), and The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2006). His collections of poetry include Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin, 2006), Ing Grish, with Paintings by Thomas Nozkowski (Saturnalia, 2005),Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin, 2002), Forbidden Entries (Black Sparrow, 1996), Berlin Diptychon with Photographs by Bill Barrette (Timken, 1995), Edificio Sayonara (Black Sparrow, 1992),Corpse and Mirror (Holt & Rinehardt, 1983), a National Poetry Series book selected by John Ashbery, and Broken Off by The Music (Burning Deck, 1981). Artists' books include projects with Squeak Carnwath, Richard Tuttle, Norbert Prangenberg, Hanns Schimannsky, Archie Rand, Norman Bluhm, Pat Steir, Suzanne McClelland, Robert Therrien, Leiko Ikemura, and Jürgen Partenheimer (a.o.), his books of art criticism include The United States of Jasper Johns (1996) and In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (1993). He has also edited Fetish (1998), a fiction anthology.

He has been the Arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail since March 2004. (See http://www.brooklynrail.org). He currently teaches art criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.

Yau has received awards and grants from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, the Academy of American Poets [Lavan Award],American Poetry Review [Jerome Shestack Award], the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the General Electric Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

The Fall 1990 (vol. 5) issue of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics featured several articles on Yau:

1. An Interview with John Yau By: Foster, Edward; 31-50.
2. John Yau By: Foster, Edward (ed.); 31-50, 113-151.
3. On John Yau By: Chaloner, David; 113-114.
4. On John Yau By: Corbett, William; 114-115.
5. On John Yau By: Hemensley, Kris; 116-118.
6. Harmonic Interferences: A Note on John Yau By: Donahue, Joseph; 118-119.
7. The Dream Science of John Yau's 'Dragon's Blood' By: Mobilio, Albert; 119-120.
8. Guilt by Dissociation: John Yau's Poetics of Possibility By: Wald, Priscilla; 121-125.
9. 'Pieces of a Piece' By: Campbell, Bruce; 126-134.
10. John Yau: A Selected Bibliography By: Foster, Edward; 147-151.