Writers Grace M. Cho & Gary Pak will share their work and engage in a conversation about separated families, the traumas of war, and LIFTing the ban to travel to North Korea.
Grace Cho, who most recently is the Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature, was a Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and whose book Tastes Like War was A TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021. She is a professor of sociology at CUNY; her previous book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, was published in 2008 and she is an active scholar.
Gary Pak was a professor of English at the University of Hawaii until his recent retirement. He is the author of many works, including The Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories, A Ricepaper Airplane, Children of a Fireland, Language of the Geckos and Other Stories, Brothers Under a Same Sky, Chon-go Ma-bi / High Sky, and Horse Fattening: Essays on Contemporary Korean Culture. He co-edited Yobo: Korean American Writing in Hawai‘i (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2003). He has published a children’s play, Beyond the Falls, which was produced by the Honolulu Theater for Youth in 2001.
This event is organized by LIFT (Let Individuals Freely Travel), a joint initiative of the Korea Peace Network, the Korea Peace Now! Grassroots Network, and Peace Treaty Now.