Nora okja keller biography templates
•
Nora Okja Keller, 27th Annual ODU Literary Festival
Document Type
Featured Participant
Location
Chandler Recital Hall, Diehn Center for the Performing Arts
Author/Artist Bio
Nora Okja Keller was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in Hawaii. Her most recent novels include: Comfort Woman () and Fox Girls (). In she received the Pushcart Prize for a short story, "Mother Tongue," which later became a part of Comfort Woman, her first novel and winner of the American Book Award. Her recently published second novel, Fox Girl, is set in Korea in the mid '60s. Keller’s novels are situated during and after World War II. The subject is the little-known history of the use of Korean women as prostitutes by Japanese soldiers and the abandoned children of American GI’s after the American occupation. She depicts a world of poverty and brutal survival. She also deals with themes of racism, heritage, Korean-American womanhood, child prostitution, and American consumerism. Nora Ok
•
Novelist Nora Okja Keller was born in Seoul, Korea. Her father was a German computer engineer and her mother, a Korean "jack of all trades." Keller grew up in Hawaii and attended the University of Hawaii. In she received the Pushcart Prize for a short story, "Mother Tongue," which later became a part of Comfort Woman, her first novel and winner of the American Book Award.
Her recently published second novel, Fox Girl, is set in Korea in the mid '60s and is the story of three young Koreans who are marginalized by their society and abused by American GIs. It is a harrowing tale told unflinchingly and yet with lyricism. Nora Keller continues to tap into the reservoirs of historical relevance. In a statement that applies equally to Fox Girl, Keller relates, "While I was working on the novel [Comfort Woman], I'd type in 'comfort women' into a search engine and come up with Martha Stewart articles about how to make the home more comfortable. When I came back from my book to
•
Nora Okja Keller's luminous first novel, Comfort Woman, winner of the American Book Award, is an unsettling narrative that interweaves first person stories of a Korean American mother and daughter, each of whom are haunted by the mother's harrowing experience as a sex slave in a Japanese Recreation Camp during World War II. It is an experience that leaves the mother halfway in the world of the living and halfway in the spirit world, haunted by the ghost of the woman whose place she takes in the camp after the Akiko before her dies a martyr's death at the hands of Japanese soldiers.
Keller is a writer, who like one of the mothers of contemporary Asian American literature, Maxine Hong Kingston, will not let forsaken ghosts go unworshipped. With Comfort Woman and her newly published second novel Fox Girl, which charts the brutal narrative of two young Korean bar girls who come to Hawaii, she revives the lives of women largely silenced in history. Along the way, she rips the ski