Therese Park

The Kansas City Star

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 Contemporary Authors 2001. It was also 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 (1951-1953).

Her essays and articles have been published in such publications as The Kansas City Star, The Sun Publication, The Best times, and Our Family (Canada), The Beat Magazine and Korea Bridge (South Korea) and others.

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 Andre Navarra.

After two novels and 70 published articles, she now writes columns for the Kansas City Star-Johnson County Neighborhood News. In 2006, she was selected to write "Midwest Voices" columns, which appeared on the Star's Opinion Page.