Laurence Yep

Yep's most notable collection of works is the Golden Mountain Chronicles, documenting the fictional Young family from 1849 in China to 1995 in America.

Laurence Michael Yep (born June 14, 1948) is an American writer.

He is known for his children's books, having won the Newbery Honor twice for his Golden Mountain series.

Yep graduated from St. Ignatius College Preparatory in 1966.

His decision to become a writer did not come until he entered college at Marquette University.

There he became friends with a literary magazine editor, Joanne Ryder.

She introduced him to children's literature and later encouraged him to write a book for children while she was working at Harper & Row.

After two years at Marquette, Yep transferred to UC Santa Cruz where he earned a BA in 1970.

He later earned a PhD in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Growing up, Yep often felt torn between mainstream American culture and his Chinese roots, a theme he has often written about.

A great deal of his work involves characters feeling alienated or not fitting into their environment, something Yep has said he struggled with since childhood: "I was too American to fit into Chinatown, and too Chinese to fit in anywhere else."

During his writing career, Yep also taught creative writing and Asian-American studies at the University of California at Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara.

The result was his first science fiction novel for teens entitled Sweetwater, published by Harper & Row in 1973.

Two of the series are Newbery Honor Books, or runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal: Dragonwings (Harper & Row, 1975) and Dragon's Gate (HarperCollins, 1993).

It won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award in 1976, and has been adapted as a play under its original title.

Another of the Chronicles, Child of the Owl won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for children's fiction in 1977.

Yep wrote two other notable series, Chinatown Mysteries and Dragon (1982 to 1992).

The latter is an adaptation of Chinese mythology as four fantasy novels.

Yep married the writer Joanne Ryder in 1984.

They live in Pacific Grove, California.

(The Rainbow People, Yep's collection of short stories based on Chinese folktales and legends, was a Horn Book runner-up in 1989.)

Dragonwings won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association in 1995, recognizing the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award.

In 2005, he received the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his career contribution to American children's literature.

Yep was born in San Francisco, California, in Chinatown to Thomas (Gim Lew) Yep and Franche Lee Yep.

His father was a first-generation American born in China who had moved to San Francisco as a boy and grown up with an Irish friend in his neighborhood.

His mother was a second-generation Chinese American, was born in Ohio and raised in West Virginia where her family ran a Chinese laundry.

After struggling through the Great Depression, Yep's family moved to a multicultural but predominantly African American neighborhood.

Yep grew up working in the family grocery store, where he recalls learning early on "how to observe and listen to people, how to relate to others. It was good training for a writer."

Yep was named by his older brother Thomas, who had just been studying the biography of Saint Lawrence for school.

He spent his early childhood commuting from his neighborhood to a Catholic school in Chinatown for Chinese children, where he was often made fun of by the mostly bilingual students for only knowing how to speak English.

Not until high school when Yep attended a less segregated Catholic school did he confront white American culture in person, having grown up among Black and Chinese kids.

Although he had always been interested in science, at St. Ignatius College Preparatory, he also became interested in literature and creative writing.

Yep published his first story in a science fiction magazine at the age of 18 while still in high school.

His English teacher, a Jesuit priest, motivated him to submit his story to magazines until it got published if he wanted to get an A grade.

This experience inspired Yep to first consider what a career in writing might be like, even though he had always been fascinated with machines and wanted to become a chemist.

In 2005 the professional children's librarians awarded Yep the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, which recognizes a living author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made "a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children".

The committee noted that "Yep explores the dilemma of the cultural outsider" with "attention to the complexity and conflict within and across cultures" and it cited four works in particular: Dragonwings, The Rainbow People, The Khan's Daughter, and the autobiographical The Lost Garden.

A live-action/CGI TV movie of The Tiger's Apprentice, adapted by David Magee, was being developed by Cartoon Network until it was cancelled after Cartoon Network stopped developing live-action projects.

In March 2019, Paramount Pictures announced an animated film adaptation of the book with a script by Magee and a release date of February 2, 2024.

As of 2011 there are ten published chronicles spanning 1835 to the present.