Brief Bio of Author for b.b.wei (original name Bing Betty Wei) - Born and brought up in Shanghai, China, throughout the Cultural Revolution, b.b. wei started writing by sending letters to my parents in their re-educational camps at five years old. Later, after their return, her short stories and poems in Chinese were first published at the age of 16 in the Shanghai Youth newspaper. When she launched a campus poetry magazine in China at 18, she was disillusioned by the censorship process for poetry and became an underground campus poet in China. Her first poem in English was inspired by her deep depression in the summer of 1989, witnessing her peers being gunned down in Tiananmen Square on TV as a Chinese student living in England. Writing poetry in her second language gave her freedom without worrying about censorship. Ms. Wei’s professional career has evolved into the corporate world in the San Francisco Bay Area on corporate social responsibilities areas (Cisco, Bay Area Council, and The Word International Inc); she has managed to publish over 20 pieces of short stories, essays, and novellas in Chinese and English in China, Hong Kong, England, and the US. Selected as one of the Presidential Leadership Scholars by President Clinton and Bush Foundation in 2016 and highlighted as the Immigrant Leader of the Month in June 2021 by Bush Center, Ms. Wei also is making a local community impact by sharing the community’s trauma through her poetry. With recent racism against Asian Americans and our community's traumatic events in the USA, Ms. Wei has selected poems themed on Asian immigrants’ trauma to read in events to support related causes.
