Author Laurence Michael Yep has written more than 50 works of fiction, mostly for young readers. Yep grew up in San Francisco, where he was born June 14, 1948, but has roots in West Virginia. During the Depression, Yep's maternal relatives moved from China to Ohio and then to Clarksburg, before settling in California.

Growing up hearing about his family's life in West Virginia, Yep based two of his books on those stories. The award-winning novel The Star Fisher, which was published in 1991, is an account of a Chinese-American family that moves to Clarksburg to open a laundry. For the book's portrayal of life in West Virginia, Yep received the West Virginia Library Association's 1995 Literary Merit Award. Dream Soul, a sequel, was published in 2000. Yep's autobiography, The Lost Garden, includes a section about his West Virginia connection.

Yep attended Marquette University for two years, earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and received a Ph.D. from State University of New York at Buffalo. He has taught creative writing and Asian-American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara. He lives in California.