Grace M. Cho is a nonfiction writer and Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of Tastes Like War, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction, and Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, recipient of a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in The Nation, Catapult, The New Inquiry, PoemMemoirStory, Contexts, Gastronomica, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Marble House Project, Monson Arts, Convent Arts, the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY.
Cho’s current book project (under contract with Viking Press) is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction and interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the Korean War through the lens of her family’s experience of the war’s devastation and afterlife. Drawing on archival research, family interviews, investigation reports from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea, and witness testimonies from South Korea’s bereaved families’ associations, it juxtaposes the official U.S. narrative of the Korean War—as a righteous war that gave South Koreans their freedom and protected U.S. interests—with a counter-narrative of genocide and ongoing violence.
Selected Work
- The Moral Distortions of the Official Korean War Narrative: An article for The Nation about the erasure of genocide in the official Korean War narrative.
- The Hauntings of the Korean War: On the 70th Anniversary of the Armistice: A personal essay in The Nation about the legacy of the Korean War for its survivors.