About Cathy Park Hong
Cathy Park Hong is a Korean American poet, essayist and professor. She is best known for Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020), a book of essays that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. In 2021 Time named her one of its 100 most influential people.
Hong was born and raised in Los Angeles to Korean parents. She studied at Oberlin College and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Rutgers University and served as poetry editor of The New Republic. Her site describes her as a full professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
She began as a poet. Her collections are Translating Mo'um (2002), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Engine Empire (2012). Her poetry often mixes languages and builds serial narratives; Dance Dance Revolution is narrated largely in an invented creole spoken in an imaginary desert city. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize in poetry, and Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.
Minor Feelings was her first nonfiction book, published by One World in the United States and Profile Books in the United Kingdom. Its seven essays, including "Stand Up," "Bad English" and "An Education," draw on her own life to examine Asian American identity, racism, art and friendship. Hong uses the title phrase for the negative, everyday emotions that come from racial experience and that others tend to dismiss. Her prose and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Poetry.
What Cathy Park Hong is known for
- Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
- Poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution and Engine Empire
- National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer finalist (Minor Feelings)
- Time 100 Most Influential People, 2021
- Writing on Asian American identity, language and art
Works by Cathy Park Hong
1 essay to practice
More notable works
Seven autobiographical essays on race, art and Asian American life; Pulitzer finalist and NBCC Award winner.
Bad English
Essay · 2020
Essay in Minor Feelings about language, accent and the English spoken in immigrant families.
Stand Up
Essay · 2020
Essay in Minor Feelings about her path in poetry, publishing's expectations of writers of color, and her turn to stand-up comedy.
Engine Empire
Book · 2012
Her third poetry collection, published by W. W. Norton.
Dance Dance Revolution
Book · 2007
Poetry collection narrated largely in an invented creole; winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize.
Translating Mo'um
Book · 2002
Her first poetry collection, which won a Pushcart Prize.
Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde
Essay
An essay on race in experimental poetry, listed among her essays on Wikipedia.
Cathy Park Hong’s writing style
Hong combines poetic sensibility with sharp cultural analysis. Her writing is characterized by linguistic creativity and careful examination of cultural dynamics. She excels at connecting personal experience to broader historical and social patterns.
- Memoir fused with argument
- Minor Feelings moves between personal episodes and cultural and historical analysis, so each memory is used to make a broader point about race and power.
- Unsentimental tone
- Reviewers note that she strips memories of nostalgia and tragedy; the anger in the essays is stated directly rather than softened.
- Dry, self-mocking humor
- Her humor is often aimed at herself, and "Stand Up" grows out of her interest in comedy as a blunt way to talk about racism.
- A poet's attention to language
- Her poetry blends English with other languages and slang, and her essays keep Korean words and examine accents and "bad English" directly.
- Holding several truths at once
- She avoids a single tidy account; The White Review notes how she stresses the need to balance multiple truths, even about her own community.
How to write like Cathy Park Hong
Write from a specific memory toward a larger argument. Begin with a moment that still bothers you, describe it plainly, and then ask what it shows about the systems around it, such as school, the art world, family or money. Let your own contradictions stay on the page rather than resolving them into a lesson, and make yourself the first target of any joke.
Pay attention to the texture of language itself. Notice how the people you grew up with actually spoke, keep words from other languages where they belong, and think about whose English counts as correct. Keep the emotional temperature honest: if a scene made you angry, say so without dressing it up. Organize a collection as separate essays that can each stand alone but return to the same questions from different angles.
The quickest way to absorb these habits is to retype one of Cathy Park Hong’s essays above, word for word, then write a paragraph of your own in the same voice. New to this? Read what copywork is and how to do it.
Frequently asked questions about Cathy Park Hong
- Who is Cathy Park Hong?
- Cathy Park Hong is a Korean American poet and essayist born and raised in Los Angeles. She has published three poetry collections and the essay collection Minor Feelings, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She was on the 2021 Time 100 list and is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
- What is Minor Feelings about?
- Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020) is a book of seven essays that mixes memoir with cultural criticism. Hong uses her childhood, education, friendships and career as a poet to examine racism and Asian American identity in the United States. The title refers to negative, everyday emotions that come from racial experience and are often dismissed as excessive by others.
- What poetry has Cathy Park Hong published?
- Hong has published three poetry collections: Translating Mo'um (2002), which won a Pushcart Prize; Dance Dance Revolution (2007), chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and narrated largely in an invented creole; and Engine Empire (2012). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review and other journals, and she received the Windham-Campbell Prize in poetry.
- What is Cathy Park Hong's writing style?
- Hong's prose combines personal memoir with sharp cultural analysis. Her tone is candid and unsentimental, her humor dry and often self-mocking, and her sentences carry a poet's attention to sound and to how language marks class and belonging. She keeps Korean words in her English and prefers holding several truths at once to giving a single neat conclusion.