Sonia Shinn Sunoo was a Korean American teacher, researcher, and writer. Her father left Korea for the United States in 1903, as part of the very first Koreans to emigrate. He worked on a sugar cane planation in Hawaii for two years before moving to California. Her mother left Korea at the age of nineteen as a picture bride to marry Sonia's father. Sonia was born in San Francisco in 1915 and grew up in Chinatown. She went to San Francisco State College where she majored in English and Biology. She also earned a M.A. in Human Development and Early Childhood Education.

In 1943, Sonia married Harold Sunoo. They had two children. Sonia taught Korean language at the University of Washington from 1943 to 1949. In 1951, she received a summer scholarship to attend Stanford for graduate work but had to leave prior to completing her dissertation due to her husband's inability to find a job upon returning from oversees. After Harold was still unable to find teaching work, Sonia ended up helping him with his grocery store business in between her own research in the 1970s of Korean picture brides and early Korean immigrants as part of the Korean American Oral History Project. Both Sunoo and her husband also wrote articles in the 1970s and 1980s regarding the first Korean women immigrants in the in the United States. Sunoo's first book oral histories book was published in 1982.

An interview from 2001 revealed it was Sunoo's greatest wish to have her book on Korean picture brides published. Sunoo felt these women were courageous pioneers who sought escape and freedom from the Confucian strictures of Korea and that they were often misrepresented in their portrayal simply because they were marrying a stranger in the United States. Sunoo strived to tell the stories of these women's desire for freedom and education and reveal the true feminist values they represented. "Korean Picture Brides: 1903-1920: a collection of oral histories" was published on May 1, 2002.