Sheng Yang

Sheng Yang is co-author, with Sami Scripter, of Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America, the first major English-language cookbook of Hmong-American cuisine. Born in Laos, she immigrated to the U.S. in 1979 at age nine with her family and later settled in the Sacramento, California area, where she works as a medical assistant and is a mother of six. In Portland she formed a lifelong friendship with Scripter; their shared cooking led them to document more than 100 recipes, stories, and cultural notes that had traditionally been passed down orally. The book preserves Hmong culinary traditions for future generations while introducing the cuisine to a wider audience.