David Lau

Poet David Lau grew up in Long Beach, California. He has described his family as a “Chicano-Chinese and Anglo household.” He earned degrees from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The poems in his first book, Virgil and the Mountain Cat (2009), were described by the Believer’s Dominic Luxford as “simultaneously creative and destructive … grounded in—or rather, trapped by—the present. …” Chosen as a Poetry Society of America New American Poet, Lau himself described his own goals for poetry: “The force field of allusion need be maximal in this poetry: a harmony of the low and high, of social inequality and natural abundance.” Lau is also the author of the chapbook Bad Opposites (2012). With Cal Bedient, he edits the journal Lana Turner.