Cathy Park Hong

Cathy Park Hong was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her parents were Korean immigrants to the U.S., and her father worked as a life insurance salesman and ran an industrial warehouse. In Minor Feelings, Hong depicts her childhood as largely tumultuous and unhappy but cites summer trips to visit her grandparents in Seoul as a rare bright spot. She was a self-described “socially awkward recluse” through high school, but she credits Oberlin College with opening her mind and giving her the confidence and freedom that she needed to dedicate her life to art. Although she started out planning to become a visual artist, she eventually switched to poetry, thanks largely to positive experiences studying with Myung Mi Kim. Hong then earned her MFA in Poetry at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she first confronted the complexity of writing about race as a poet in the U.S. She lived in New York for many years, where she worked a series of odd jobs, ranging from barista and aromatherapeutic cleanser salesperson to fact checker and reporter for the Village Voice. Her first book, Translating Mo’um (2002), won the Pushcart Prize for work published by small presses, and her second, Dance Dance Revolution (2007), won the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the $165,000 Windham Campbell Prize, and a Fulbright scholarship, which allowed her to work as a journalist and translator in South Korea. The 2020 publication of Minor Feelings, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, launched Hong to national fame. In 2021, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. As of 2022, she lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry writing at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.