Biographical Note
Dori Jones Yang was born Dorothy E. Jones in 1954 in Youngstown, Ohio. Yang began her career in writing as an intern at the Youngstown Vindicator. She pursued a degree in European history at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where she served as a reporter and editor for the Daily Princetonian.
Yang graduated in 1976, after which she spent two years teaching English and learning Mandarin Chinese in Singapore on a Princeton-in-Asia fellowship. She traveled extensively through Asia and the Middle East before pursing a master's degree in international affairs at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Yang joined Business Week in 1981 and served as a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong from 1982 to 1990. As bureau manager, she covered the Sino-British negotiations and the Tiananmen Square crisis in Beijing. While living in Hong Kong, she met Paul Yang, an urban developer. The couple married in 1985.
In 1990, the couple moved to Washington state, where Yang helped establish Business Week's Seattle office, which she managed until 1995. She published Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in 1997. In 2000, she published the children's book The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, which won the Pleasant T. Rowland Prize for Fiction for Girls and the Skipping Stones Honor Award for multicultural books. In the late 1990s, Yang began a position as a business and technology correspondent at U.S. News and World Report, where she reported on the dot-com boom. In 2001, she became a freelance journalist and blogger at the Huffington Post.
In 2009, Yang began conducting oral interviews of the second wave of Chinese immigrants who settled in the Seattle, Washington, area. The short autobiographies of these mid-twentieth-century Chinese immigrants were compiled in her 2011 book Voices of the Second Wave: Chinese Americans in Seattle. Yang published the young adult novel Daughter of Xanadu in 2011 and its sequel, Son of Venice, in 2012.