Please Wait by the Coat Room is for readers interested in the art and artists of color that many mainstream institutions and critics misrepresented or overlooked. It presents a view guided by the artists' desire for autonomy and freedom in a culture that has deemed them undesirable or invisible.

John Yau is a poet, fiction writer, art critic, and curator who began writing about art in 1978, when his reviews first appeared in Art in America. Since then, he has contributed essays to more than 200 catalogs and museum publications, curated exhibitions, and been the arts editor for The Brooklyn Rail (2007-2011) and regular contributor to the online magazine Hyperallergic (since 2012). The author of monographs on Jasper Johns, Liu Xiaodong, Catherine Murphy, A. R. Penck and many others, he received the Rabkin Prize for art criticism in 2021.