Cathy Park Hong
Award-winning Poet, New York Times Bestselling Author of Minor Feelings
Cathy Park Hong is an award-winning poet and essayist whose book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, is a searching work that ruthlessly reckons with the American racial consciousness. Hong weaves together personal stories, historical context, and cultural criticism to ultimately create an emotional and impactful exploration of Asian American personhood.
She offers a fresh and honest perspective on race and Asian American identity, discusses how poetry and writing can be a means for understanding ourselves and our world, and comments on the ways politics and culture are influenced by art—and vice versa. Hong utilizes the craft of poetry as a lens for social change.
Minor Feelings, the 2020 recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, is a radically honest meditation on the Asian American experience. Hong draws upon her background as a poet and the daughter of Korean immigrants to create a work that flows seamlessly between cultural analysis, personal anecdotes, and historical framework. She writes about how her upbringing was steeped in shame and self-loathing. These “minor feelings,” she comes to understand in the book, were the result of believing the stereotypes that American society fed her about her own racial identity.
Praised by Claudia Rankine, Jia Tolentino, and other prominent writers of our time, Minor Feelings is a critical work that reckons with our racialized past and present. TIME named Minor Feelings one of the top 10 Non-Fiction books of 2020.
Hong is also the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution (which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize), Engine Empire, and Translating Mo’Um. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Boston Review, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and a full professor at the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program in poetry.
She offers a fresh and honest perspective on race and Asian American identity, discusses how poetry and writing can be a means for understanding ourselves and our world, and comments on the ways politics and culture are influenced by art—and vice versa. Hong utilizes the craft of poetry as a lens for social change.
Minor Feelings, the 2020 recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, is a radically honest meditation on the Asian American experience. Hong draws upon her background as a poet and the daughter of Korean immigrants to create a work that flows seamlessly between cultural analysis, personal anecdotes, and historical framework. She writes about how her upbringing was steeped in shame and self-loathing. These “minor feelings,” she comes to understand in the book, were the result of believing the stereotypes that American society fed her about her own racial identity.
Praised by Claudia Rankine, Jia Tolentino, and other prominent writers of our time, Minor Feelings is a critical work that reckons with our racialized past and present. TIME named Minor Feelings one of the top 10 Non-Fiction books of 2020.
Hong is also the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution (which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize), Engine Empire, and Translating Mo’Um. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Boston Review, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and a full professor at the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program in poetry.
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