Cathy Park Hong
Cathy Park Hong is a poet and essayist whose 2020 book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning became a cultural landmark, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and sparking widespread conversation about Asian American identity, racism, and the politics of feeling. Born in Los Angeles to Korean immigrant parents, Hong grew up navigating the complexities of a community caught between the Black-white binary of American racial discourse and the model minority myth that rendered Asian American pain invisible.
She earned her B.A. from Oberlin College and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied poetry. Her poetry collections — Translating Mo’um (2002), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), and Engine Empire (2012) — established her as a formally inventive and politically engaged poet, one willing to experiment with voice, dialect, and the language of colonialism and assimilation. Dance Dance Revolution won the Barnard Women Poets Prize.
Minor Feelings collects essays that examine the psychic damage inflicted by structural racism on Asian Americans — what Hong calls the “minor feelings” that arise when one’s experience contradicts the optimistic stories the dominant culture tells about itself. Drawing on her own biography, on art, on the lives of other Asian American writers and artists, and on cultural theory, the essays are at once personal and analytical, lyrical and argumentative. The book has been assigned in university courses across the humanities and social sciences and has become essential reading for anyone trying to understand contemporary American racial dynamics.
Hong is a professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is widely regarded as one of the most important writers working in America today.
