Laurence Yep

Laurence Michael Yep is an award-winning Chinese-American modern author. He was born on June 14, 1948, in San Francisco, California, the youngest child of his family. Growing up in a black neighborhood San Francisco, Yep felt alienated. He was, in his own words, his neighborhood's "all-purpose Asian" and did not feel he had a culture of his own. While he was in high school, he discovered and began writing science fiction. At 18, his first short story was published—he was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. He continued to write and five years later published his first novel, Sweetwater.

In 1966, he attended Marquette University and he graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1970. He received his doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he wrote his dissertation and got his Ph.D in 1975. Yep met Joanne Ryder, a children's book author, during college while she was his editor. The two became friends and they later married. They now live in San Francisco, where he writes and teaches.

One of children's literature's most respected Asian American authors, Mr. Yep has written many novels, including Dragonwings, a Newbery Honor Book of 1976, and Dragon's Gate, a Newbery Honor Book of 1994. He is also the author of When the Circus Came to Town; The Imp That Ate My Homework, winner of the Georgia Children's Book Award; and The Magic Paintbrush. Mr. Yep has also taught creative writing and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara. In 1990 he received an NEA fellowship in fiction.

As of 2011 there are ten published Golden Mountain Chronicles spanning 1835 to the present. Here they are ordered by the fictional history and the year of the narrative follows the title; none of the titles includes a date.

1. The Serpent's Children, set in 1849 (1984)
2. Mountain Light, 1855 (1985)
3. Dragon's Gate, 1867 (1993)
4. The Traitor, 1885 (2003)
5. Dragonwings, 1903 (1975)
6. Dragon Road, 1939 (2007); originally The Red Warrior
7. Child of the Owl, 1960 (1977)
8. Sea Glass, 1970 (1979)
9. Thief of Hearts, 1995 (1995)
10. Dragons of Silk, 1835-2011 (2011)