About the Contributors

Esther Kwon Arinaga is a retired attorney, writer, and community worker. Her father was among the first wave of immigrants from Korea to the United States and her mother was an early picture bride. Both parents were active in the Korean independence movement. Arinaga is coeditor of Allan Saunders: The Man and His Legacy and a contributor and consultant to many other books, including Montage: An Ethnic History of Women in Hawai'i.

Heinz Insu Fenkl was born in Inch'on, Korea, in 1960 and came to America with his parents when he was twelve. A writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar, he directs the creative writing program at the State University of New York in New Paltz. His autobiographical novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, is about the coming-of-age of an Amerasian in Korea.

Jenny Ryun Foster was adopted from Korea in 1974. She has studied Korean literature, shamanism, and folklore in the United States and Korea. A fiction writer, she works as a librarian in Honolulu.

Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Korea and came to the United States in the sixties. She translated into Korean the works of Krishnamurti, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Czeslaw Milosz, and Gary Snyder. With her American husband, she translated into English the Korean poet Pak Nam-Su. Her poem in this volume is from A Hummingbird's Dance (Parallax Press, 1994), which renders a life suffused with Buddhist spirituality and deep compassion. In 2000, Ok-Koo passed away after a long illness.

Tom Haar was born in Japan in 1941 and moved to Hawai'i in 1959 with his family. After receiving his masters' degree in visual design from the University of Hawai'i, he spent fifteen years in New York as a freelance photographer. He has had solo exhibitions in Budapest, New York, Honolulu, Japan, and Seoul. In 1983, he was invited to teach photography at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, during which time he traveled around the South Korean countryside. In 2001, he completed a book on the photographic career of his father entitled Francis Haar: A Lifetime of Images.

Karen Hong is a painter whose work has been shown at various galleries and museums, including Salon 5, the Pegge Hopper Gallery, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. In 1996, she graduated with a degree in fine arts from the University of Hawai'i.

Ezekiel Chihye Hwang was born in 1975 in Korea and moved to the United States in 1991. Her paintings and prints have been exhibited at Honolulu City Hall as part of the Korean Artist Association of Hawai'i's yearly showcase and at the Commons Gallery of the University of Hawai'i. She is currently pursuing a degree in fine arts at the university.

Hwang Sun-Won (1915-2000) was born in Taedong, in northern Korea; his family escaped to the south in 1946. He graduated from Waseda University in 1939 and taught at Kyonghui University in Seoul until 1993. In an exceptionally long literary career, he published seven novels and more than one hundred stories.

Ha-Yun Jung was born in Seoul, where she lived most of her life before coming to the United States in 1996. She is at work on a novel as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was previously the Carol Houck Smith fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has received a grant from the Korea Literature Translation Institute.

K. Connie Kang was born in 1942 in Tanch'on county, northern Korea. At the age of nine, she fled war-torn Korea for Japan with her family. She did not return to her homeland until 1967, after spending nine years studying in the United States. She returned to the States in 1970. She is a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and a columnist for the Korean Times.

Kloe Sookhee Kang studied clothing and textile art at Seoul National University in Korea and painting at the...