Jiang TaoJiang Tao is a Beijing-based poet, literary critic, translator, and historian, known as much for his wry, cerebral verse as his ground-breaking studies of Republican (1911-49) literature. An Associate Professor at Peking University, he has hel literary residencies in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States. He was born in Tianjin in 1970, and studied first at Tsinghua University, only to abandon biomedical engineering for a PhD in Chinese literature at Peking University, where he also began teaching in 2002. He wrote poetry as a student, and was editor of the folk poetry journals Offset and Poetry Communications. His first collection Bird Sutras was published in 2005, and he has since published Four Poems and Mourning for Sometimes. He won the Liu Li'an Prize for Poetry in 1997.