Poet and editor Yi Ping, ICOA’s first writer-in-residence, has contributed to a book celebrating the life and work of Liu Xiaobo, the late Chinese activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate was published on April 1 by Potomac Books. Yi Ping’s chapter is titled “Liu Xiaobo, Who Has Ascended the Altar.” 

You can order a copy at Buffalo Street Books.

In a note announcing the publication, senior editor Joanne Leedom-Ackerman wrote:

Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2010, spent his adult life writing and working for a more democratic and transparent China. These 75+ essays and poems, written by those who knew and worked with Xiaobo during his life, reveal the portrait of a man of courage, a writer of more than 1,000 essays and 18 books himself, a man who took on the Chinese government with ideas and nonviolent action and ultimately paid with his life. He has justifiably been called the Nelson Mandela or the Vaclav Havel of China.

A native of China, Yi Ping participated in the Students’ Democracy Movement as a young man. Banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, he was permanently banned from working in education and forbidden to publish his work. He fled China in 1991, living in Poland before moving to the United States. He was ICOA writer-in-residence from 2001 to 2003. He and his wife Lin Zhou have lived in Ithaca ever since.