Daughter of a bookseller, Dori Jones Yang grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. A lifelong fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, she began writing early and penned several mysteries at the age of ten. In high school she fell in love with foreign travel, starting with France during a summer abroad.

Her first journalism job was a summer internship with the Youngstown Vindicator, where she wrote obituaries. At Princeton, she majored in European history but spent most of her waking hours at The Daily Princetonian. Four summers in a row, she worked for newspapers as an intern.

After graduation, a two-year fellowship with Princeton-in-Asia sent her to Singapore to teach English and study Mandarin Chinese. She traveled all over East and Southeast Asia on a shoestring and returned home through Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, six months before the Shah fell. Then she earned a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins in international affairs, with a focus on China.

Dori spent the bulk of her journalism career with Business Week, joining in 1981 as an editor in New York. A year later, she became the magazine’s youngest foreign bureau chief, at the age of 28, in Hong Kong.  During her eight years there, she covered the Sino-British negotiations over Hong Kong’s future and the Tiananmen Square crisis in Beijing. During these years, she met and married her husband, Paul Yang. They have three children: Steve, Serena, and Emily.

Since 1990, Dori has lived near Seattle. She covered Boeing and other Northwest companies for Business Week and later worked for U.S. News & World Report covering Silicon Valley, the Microsoft antitrust trial, and the dot-com boom and bust.

Dori’s first book was Pour Your Heart Into It, How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, published by Hyperion in 1997 and co-authored with Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz.  That book was translated into eight languages and reached several bestseller lists.

Her second book, The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, was written in response to a contest sponsored by Pleasant Company Publications, publishers of the American Girl books.  From hundreds of submissions, her book was chosen as the winner and published in 2000. It also won the Skipping Stones honor award for multicultural books.

Dori spent six years writing her latest book, a historical novel called Daughter of Xanadu, Marco Polo’s Lost Love.  As part of her research for the book, she traveled to Mongolia and China’s Silk Road. She views Marco Polo as the patron saint of China writers, since he was the first Western writer to try to explain China to skeptical readers back home. At the heart of the book is a cross-cultural love affair that attempts to bridge the gap between East and West – a central theme in Dori’s life.

Dori’s passion revolves around China and the importance of building bridges between Americans and Asians.  She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and routinely conducted interviews in Chinese.  She has also studied French, Cantonese, Japanese, and Malay, and she plays piano, violin, and Chinese zither, called the guzheng.  Dori has traveled widely in China and Mongolia and witnessed the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

At Princeton, she studied writing with John McPhee, Haynes Johnson, and Larry L. King.  More recently, she earned two one-year certificates in literary and commercial fiction from University of Washington.  She has studied screenwriting under Robert McKee in Los Angeles and took writing classes for six years with Seattle-based novelist and nature writer Brenda Peterson.