Xiao Kaiyu was born in 1960 in Sichuan province, and trained and worked as a doctor of Chinese medicine. He is the author of several volumes of poetry and has published poems and essays in various official and unofficial journals in China, and founded three underground poetry magazines. He spent a number of years in Germany. In recent years he has taught Chinese literature at universities in Shanghai and the central Chinese city of Kaifeng. His poems have been translated into German, English, Italian, French, Japanese, and Serbian.