Timothy Liu is an American poet and editor whose work explores desire, queer life, intimacy, grief, sexuality, literary memory, and the charged textures of contemporary experience. Born in San Jose, California, in 1965, Liu has published poetry across more than three decades and has taught creative writing and literature at several American universities.
Since 2025 he has served as Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz. His books include Vox Angelica, Burnt Offerings, Say Goodnight, Hard Evidence, Of Thee I Sing, For Dust Thou Art, Polytheogamy, Don’t Go Back to Sleep, Kingdom Come: A Fantasia, and Luminous Debris.
Timothy Liu in Shampoo
Shampoo published Liu in Issues 4 and 24. Issue 4 presented “Next Day.” Issue 24 later published “Dirty” and “Doom Queens,” two poems in which sexuality, literary reference, shame, desire, death, and dark comedy move through compressed dramatic scenes.
These appearances place Liu within Shampoo’s archive of contemporary poets and within a wider field of American poetry shaped by queer experience, elegy, erotic candor, and literary inheritance.
Dirty
“Dirty” compresses marriage, travel, pornography, desire, Paul Celan, bodily contact, and the residue of intimacy into a brief charged encounter. Its references move rapidly between private erotic experience and the burden of literary memory.
Doom Queens
“Doom Queens” begins with a student’s invocation of Sylvia Plath and moves through Anne Sexton, teaching, self-destruction, intoxication, and uneasy laughter. Liu lets canonical literary figures enter the poem as part of lived conversation, exposing how literary myth can collide with immediate human vulnerability.
Books and queer poetics
Liu’s books return repeatedly to desire, faith, the body, loss, shame, and the instability of intimate relationships. His anthology Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry also documents his long engagement with queer literary community and poetic lineage.
Across his writing, formal compression intensifies emotional exposure. Repetition, quotation, enjambment, dramatic address, and literary allusion create poems where private life and cultural memory remain closely entangled.
Teaching and literary life
Liu has taught creative writing and literature for decades. His current role at SUNY New Paltz includes directing the Creative Writing program, while his teaching interests include poetry, contemporary American poetry, and Asian American literature.
Further reading
SUNY New Paltz provides Liu’s current academic profile. The Academy of American Poets offers a biography, bibliography, and selected work.