Therese Park

Therese Park came to the United States to be a cellist with the Kansas City Philharmonic (now the Kansas City Symphony) in 1966. After 30 years, she retired and began writing fulltime. Her first novel A Gift of the Emperor (published in 1997) is about a Korean schoolgirl forced into military prostitution by the Japanese government during World War II. With this book, Park was one of the featured authors at three national bookfairs in 1998: The Los Angeles Bookfair, The Miami Bookfair, The Heartland Bookfair. A Gift of the Emperor was selected in the reference volumes Reading Groups Choices for 1998 and she was mentioned in Contemporary Authors 2001. The book was translated and published in Turkey in 2001.

Reviews:

"A valuable addition to World War II literature..."
--Kansas City Star
"...a horrible story beautifully told, a graphic, fictionalized account of Japanese brutality..."
--Sojourner: The Women's Forum
"She controls the story with magnificent restraint... She juggles the responsibility of storyteller and historian with remarkable restraint..."
--American Reporter
"Lyrical bittersweet moments shimmer throughout..."
--MSRRT Newsletter

Her second novel "When a Rooster Crows at Night: A Child's Experience of the Korean War" was published in 2004. This story is based on what she witnessed during the Korean war (1950-1953).

Her third "The Northern Wind: a Forced Journey to North Korea" deals with intense inner war between the two Koreas divided by two extreme ideologies--Communism and Capitalism. A South Korean teenage girl, originally from the North, becomes an unwilling spy sent to the North with a mission to acomplish, after she reports a suspicious armed men speaking with northern dialect and exchanging South Korean government activites at a remote creek. She reunites with her father.

Her recently published "Returned and Reborn: a Tale of a Korean Orphan Boy," published by Austin Macauley Publishers, LLC. in New York, NY., explores the Korean society's contempt toward children of mixed blood, of unwed mothers, and those born "imperfect" that caused the country to banish more than 200,000 innocent infants and toddlers to be raised by foreign parents, most of them in the U.S.. And this story is based on a true facts. The main character, the orphan, is the illegitimate son of an influential American Catholic Priest, who, with his five Jesuit Brothers, established the first Catholic college for both men and women in Seoul in the 1960's, which today is recognized as the best adult education center in arts and humanity in Asia.

Park has written more than 400 essays and articles that have been published in The Kansas City Star, The Sun Publication, The Graybeard, National Korean War Veterans Magazine, The Best Times, and Our Family (Canada), The Beat Magazine and Korea Bridge (South Korea) and more.

She holds a Bachelor of Music from Seoul National University-School of Music and Master of Cello Performance from Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, France. She studied with the legendary cellist Andre` Navarra.

She has been writing Commentary for the Kansas City Star-Johnson County Neighborhood News since Jan. 2009. In 2006, she was selected to write "Midwest Voices" columns, which appeared on the Star's Opinion Page.

She is mother of three daughters--Susanne, Irene, and Christine--and grandmother of four--Alex, Emma, Sara, and Oliver.