Evelyn Lau was born in Vancouver in 1971 and has lived and worked in the city for her entire life. Her poems have appeared in nearly 100 literary magazines and anthologies in the past 20 years including the Best American Poetry series. Her work You Are Not Who You Claim won the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award and Oedipal Dreams was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. Early in her professional writing career, she received a Canadian Authors Association Award for Most Promising Writer and more recently received the National Magazine Award for Poetry (Silver).

Her work in magazines has won four Western Magazine Awards and a National Magazine Award; she also received the Air Canada Award, the Vantage Women of Originality Award, the ACWW Community Builders Award and the Mayor's Arts Award for Literary Arts. Her poems were selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry (1992) and Best Canadian Poetry (2009, 2010, 2011, 2016). Lau has also worked as writer in residence at the University of British Columbia, Kwantlen University and Vancouver Community College, and was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Calgary.

Her legacy project as Poet Laureate was to meet with aspiring poets in the community through a series of poet in residence consultations at the Vancouver Public Library. With support from the City of Vancouver and the Association of B.C. Book Publishers, she also expanded the Poetry in Transit Program beyond the original partnership with TransLink and B.C. Transit. The program features the work of B.C.-authored and Canadian-published poets.