9/3/13

September 9: Ying Zhang Features



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m.  On September 9th, Stone Soup has the pleasure of granting both a debut and farewell feature to poet Ying Zhang.

Born in China 1974, Ying Zhang quit high school at age of 17 in order to pursue his dream of becoming China's Hemingway. After successfully working as a headhunter (recruiter) with international executive search companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong for 10+ years, he resigned from business at age of 36 and in 2010 came to the US where he has been studying for 3 years including the most recent one year studying at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts) in Santa Fe, NM and another year studying at Diné College (Navajo Tribal College) in Navajo Reservation, AZ.

The idea of studying and living with Native American peoples has been influenced by the biography of the French painter Gauguin which he read in his teen. He has never published any of his works even though more than 2,000 poems have been created by him since he started poetry writing at age of 10. Ying has just completed his Poetry Writing course at Harvard Summer School in the past summer break and is about will be returning to his home country on Sep 20th for good.