Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Engine Empire. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Boston Review, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University–Newark MFA program in poetry. In 2021, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.
“[A] formidable new essay collection . . . I read Minor Feelings in
a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. . . .
[Cathy Park] Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation
that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new
consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting
for.”—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
“Minor Feelings is a major reckoning, pulling no punches as the
author uses her life’s flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian
American experience, one with cascading consequences.”—NPR
“Hong dissects her experiences as an Asian American to create an
intricate meditation on racial awareness in the U.S. Through a
combination of cultural criticism and personal stories, Hong, a
poet, lays bare the shame and confusion she felt in her youth as
the daughter of Korean immigrants, and the way those feelings
morphed as she grew older. From analyzing Richard Pryor’s stand-up
to interrogating her relationship with the English language, Hong
underscores essential themes of identity and otherness.”—Time
“Cathy Park Hong’s new memoir confronts the tough questions of
Asian American identity. Drawing its title from Hong’s theory
regarding the impact of racial stereotypes and lies on ethnic
minorities, this memoir-in-essays is a must-read at a time of
rising racist violence and distrust.”—Bustle
“An incendiary nonfiction book about a pressing social issue of the
day . . . With its mix of the personal and political, Minor
Feelings is the kind of trenchant social critique that’s bound to
get people talking.”—BuzzFeed
“Hong busts out of the closed loop of Asian American discourse and
takes off at a run. It’s not that she doesn’t address the model
minority myth, the brutality of casual racism, or the
mortifications of a first-gen childhood; she writes passionately
about how Asians are dismissed, the lowly ‘carpenter ants of the
service industry.’ It’s just that she also makes every ‘immigrant
talking point,’ as she calls them, viscerally specific. . . .
Hong’s essays make a case for solidarity that begins at
self-awareness.”—GEN
“At-times funny, often deeply thought-provoking work . . . Minor
Feelings is an urgent consideration of identity, social structures,
and artistic practice. It’s a necessary intervention in a world
burgeoning with creativity but stymied by a lack of language and
ability to grapple with nuance. Hong takes a step in remedying
that.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Self aware and relentlessly sharp essays. Nimble, smart, and
deliberate, Minor Feelings is a major conversation starter.”—Marie
Claire
“With radical candor, Cathy Hong Park critically examines what it
means to be Asian American today and challenges herself and her
readers to abandon the idea of a monolithic Asian American
experience and instead acknowledge a range of racialized emotions
which have been heretofore dismissed.”—Ms.
“Part memoir, part cultural criticism, the poet and essayist’s
Cathy Park Hong’s first book of prose had me underlining and
annotating nearly every page.”—R. O. Kwon, Electric Literature
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