Ying Zheng was born and grew up in Shanxi, China, where she received her first Master’s degree from Shanxi University, and has since been working for the Foreign Languages Department of Taiyuan Normal University. In 2013-14, she visited Peking University, where she took a Dante course with Professor Thomas Rendall. In late 2014, she started to write poems in English. Her first poem, a sonnet sequence written in the terza rima form, was dedicated to her lifelong mentor Professor Rendall. In 2019, she earned her second Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, UK. On 14 June 2021, her ekphrastic poem “Dante and Beatrice” was published in Forum Italicum. Her English translation of Mu Yang’s poem “Loneliness” appeared in An Anthology of Chinese Poetry, 2020. Her most recent English translations of three poems by Ta Bei – “Qingxi Lake in Dusk,” “Drunk on Mao-Tai Liquor,” and “Morning Scene” – can be found here. Her ekphrastic poem “Out of the Ante-Inferno,” one of the selected artworks from the Dante 700th London competition, is on display in London through September 2021. She is currently pursuing PhD studies at Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.
