Timothy Liu was born in 1965 in San Jose, California. He is an American poet and has written books called Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse, For Dust Thou Art, Of Thee I Sing, Hard Evidence, Say Goodnight, Burnt Offerings, and Vox Angelica. He also edited a book called Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry.
Liu earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1989 from Brigham Young University and a Master of Arts degree in Poetry in 1991 from the University of Houston. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he met his husband, Christopher Arabadjis, an artist. Liu taught English at William Paterson University until he retired early in January 2022. He now teaches at SUNY New Paltz and Vassar College. He has also taught at Hampshire College, Cornell College, University of California Berkeley, University of North Carolina Wilmington, University of Michigan, Tulane University, and in the Graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College. His journals and papers are stored in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
Works
- Vox Angelica (Alice James Books, 1992; won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America)
- Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)
- Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1998; received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award)
- Hard Evidence (Talisman House, 2001)
- Of Thee I Sing (University of Georgia Press, 2004; received the Poetry Book-of-the-Year Award from Publishers Weekly)
- For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005)
- Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse (Talisman House, 2009)
- Polytheogamy (Saturnalia Books, 2009)
- Don't Go Back To Sleep (Saturnalia Books, 2014)
- Kingdom Come: A Fantasia (Talisman House, 2017)
- Luminous Debris: New & Selected Legerdemain 1992-2017 (Barrow Street Books, 2018)
- Let It Ride (Saturnalia Books, 2019)
- Down Low and Lowdown: Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues (Barrow Street Books, 2023)
- Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman House, 2000)
- Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems (Signature, 1989)
- 2002 Best American Poetry (Scribners, 2002)
- 2011 Pushcart Prize (Pushcart, 2011)
- Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets (Peculiar Pages, 2011)