JING JING YANG is the first immigrant Poet Laureate, and the first-ever reelected Poet Laureate for two consecutive terms (2020-2022) for the City of Cupertino, California. She was the grand winner of the city-wide “Celebrate Creativity” Poetry Contest 2017, with her poem “Logograph,” written in memory of her grandfather. Jing Jing also won the Cupertino Library Foundation Grant in July 2021 for her Outstanding Achievements as a Poet Laureate. Her English and Chinese writings have been featured worldwide in the “Celebrate Creativity Anthology,” “Redwood Forest, City Headline, Cupertino Scene,” and “Changsha Nightly Post.”

Born in Changsha, China. Jing Jing earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s degree in Science. She worked for Fortune 500 companies, such as Adobe and Apple as a Software Engineer when she first moved to Bay Area. Now she lives in San Jose and works as a Sr. Project Manager for a tech company.

Jing Jing released her first anthology, “Flowers In My Dreams,” in March 2022. The anthology, written in Chinese and English, represents two copies of handwritten letters, one by Chairman Mao, to her grandfather, and another by Chairman Hua, to her father. As a young eyewitness, the book details how the Cultural Revolution impacted her family, before she migrated to America. It portrays the story of how a first-generation immigrant Asian American woman struggles between the two cultures, strives for freedom whilst raising a child on her own, and how she found herself as the Poet Laureate.