Biography

Cynthia Mun immigrated to the US at the age of six from South Korea. She grew up in a working-class family near downtown Los Angeles and plotted her escape from L.A. from a young age. She’s taken classes throughout her life because she enjoys learning and received various certificates, from fancy programs such as the baking and pastry program at Le Cordon Bleu to the Executive Management program at Harvard University. In addition to English and Korean, she is fluent in the language of survival, so if she needs to hitchhike in a foreign country because she missed the last bus, she’s able to do it. Not to mention her skills in body language and hand signals so that she’s never missed a meal while traveling to over 80 countries and all seven continents.

Cynthia graduated from Tenth Street Elementary School in downtown Los Angeles, CA, John Burroughs Jr. High School in midtown Los Angeles, Westridge School for Girls in Pasadena, CA, and Yale University in New Haven, CT. (Did you see how her schools kept getting farther and farther away from downtown, Los Angeles? That was the plan of a six-year-old, and not her parents, who never ever told her to study or go to school but did tell her to go to Korea to get auctioned off for marriage, which she didn’t.)

As a double major in Fine Art, specializing in Sculpture and Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale, she slept an average of six hours per night the entire time she was at Yale.  She shared an art studio with Mathew Barney, who would go on to become a famous artist, while Cynthia realized that romanticizing about being a poor artist in New York City was only for rich people. Experiencing homelessness wasn’t an option for immigrants with a Yale degree, so said her father.

After graduating from Yale in 1990, during a recession, she moved to San Francisco, where she couldn’t find a job. (This is what happens when you don’t go to medical school like your parents asked). She started her working career as a person making paper copies at a local copy center (aka Kinko’s, but it wasn’t called that yet, and it was a job that didn’t even have a title because it was so low on the career ladder) for $5 per hour with the condition she could use their computers for free. (Computer rental was $20 per hour, so with the math, Cynthia felt she was actually getting paid $25 per hour. It was probably a good thing she didn’t pursue a career in STEM, after all.) Keep in mind that Cynthia went to college with a typewriter.

While living in San Francisco, Cynthia found her first marketing job as a marketing assistant after sending out over 200 resumes. After twenty-five years in marketing and ten as a senior executive with titles like Vice President and Commissioner, she has held every marketing position at a corporation. She implemented the first phone cards in San Francisco, launched the first e-book, the precursor to the Kindle, launched Pandora as employee number four, created the consumer insights department for MGM Resorts in Las Vegas, and was appointed by both a Republican and Democrat Governors of Nevada to the Commission on Tourism. 

She served as the Regional Advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in Nevada for ten years and as the President of the Yale Club of Nevada for twelve years.

Today, Cynthia is finally taking time to write stories she hopes her son and other children will enjoy. She writes fantasy for middle-grade readers and contemporary young-adult fiction. She splits her time between Las Vegas, NV, New Haven, CT, Gimcheon & Seoul, South Korea, and Jeinimeni in Patagonia Chile. When she is not writing, she volunteers as the ASC Director for undergraduate recruitment in Nevada for Yale University. When time permits, she mentors students.