[2] Yau was born in Lynn, Massachusetts[3] and, as a child, 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.

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.

Yau was the Arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail, from 2007 to 2011, but left to edit an online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend.

In 2021, Yau curated Three Unseen Professors, which gathered the works of three Asian-American sculptors at Tim Kim Gallery in New York, all of whom taught in the city's most prestigious institutions, yet remained mostly unacknowledged.

In 2024, Yau's essay collection Please Wait by the Coatroom won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.