Comfort Women
Referred to as Wianbu in Korean and “Comfort Women” in English, on August 14, 1991, a woman named Hak Soon Kim came forward to denounce the Japanese for the sexual enslavement of more than 200,000 women during World War II.
Biography
Tanya (Hyonhye) Ko Hong, poet, translator and cultural curator, has been published in Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, Portside, Cultural Weekly, Korea Times, Korea Central Daily News, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles, and is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Mother to Myself, A collection of poems in Korean (Prunsasang Press, 2015). Her poem, “Comfort Woman” received honorable mention in the 2015 Women’s National Book Association. For Beyond Baroque, she organized and hosted “Bittersweet: The Immigrant Stories,” a evening of poetry. Tanya is an ongoing advocate of bilingual poetry and promoting the work of immigrant poets. She lives in Palos Verdes, California. www.tanyakohong.com Kristi Crutchfield Cox is a novelist, photographer, and occasional visual artist living in Southern Oklahoma with her husband. Currently, she is completing her novel, The Tattoo’s Artist, exploring resurrection of self through ink, the Vietnam war, and feminine strengths. She recently attended Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference and was an artistic writer/presenter for A Room Of Her Own 2015. She is published in the anthology, Filling The Void; A selection of Humanist and Atheist Poetry. Currently, she writes a syndicated blog for The Ardmoreite entitled, Adventures in My Hometown.