Cathy Park Hong | |
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| Born | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Education | |
| Notable works | Dance Dance Revolution ; Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning |
Cathy Park Hong is an American poet, writer, and professor who has published three volumes of poetry. Much of her work includes mixed language [1] and serialized narrative. She was named on the 2021 Time 100 list for her writings and advocacy for Asian American women. [2]
Hong, a child of Korean parents, was raised in Los Angeles, California. [3] She graduated from Oberlin College and has an MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop. [4]
She taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, [5] Rutgers University, and UC Berkeley, [6] and was previously poetry editor for The New Republic . [7] [8]
Hong is, according to J.P. Eburne's summary of her poetic approach, "dedicated to expanding and experimenting with the capacities of a living art. Her writing, editing, and performances across media seek to open up the 'interactive possibilities' of poetry for the sake of providing 'alternative ways of living within the existing real', as she puts it. 'What are ways in which the poetic praxis can be a ritual for social experimentation? The poem as a public encounter is entrenched in habit. How many ways can we change this encounter?'" [9]
Hong's books of poems include Translating Mo'um (2002), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), and Engine Empire (2012). Her poems have appeared in A Public Space , Paris Review , Poetry , Web Conjunctions, jubilat , and Chain, among others. She has also written articles for publications like The Village Voice , The Guardian , The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times Magazine . In 2002, she won a Pushcart Prize for Translating Mo'um and she won the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize. [10]
She was named on the 2021 Time 100 list for her writings and advocacy for Asian American women. [2]
Dance Dance Revolution was Hong's second book, published in 2007 by W.W. Norton. It is a collection of poems, written in a style that encompasses "code-switching", or the mixture of several languages, such as English, Spanish, French and Korean, and spoken extremely informally with the inclusion of slang. The story takes place in an imaginary place called "The Desert", a luxurious place where people of different origins and languages mingle, causing a blend of languages that form into a dialect known in the book as "Desert Creole".
The narrator of Dance Dance Revolution is the Historian, who travels to the Desert to find the woman who her father once loved. "The Guide", a character in the story who acts as the tour guide to the Historian, is that woman. Most of the poems in the book are told from The Guide's point of view, characterized by the Guide's mixture of languages and point of view, with narration of the Historian, which is characterized by the Historian's use of standard English. The Guide uses the poems to talk about her life in the Desert as well as her past during the Kwangju Revolution, when she lived in South Korea before she moved to the Desert. [11]
When asked about the unusual language in the book, Hong commented, "As far as the language, I was reading a lot of linguistic theory at the time, particularly on this idea of Creole as a language that is in transition. French, for instance, was a Creole of Latin before it became the "official" language. English is always in transition, although the Standard version is more likely to be frozen in its glass cube. But spoken, English is a busy traffic of dialects, accents, and slang words going in and out of fashion. Slang is especially fascinating. I love outdated slang dictionaries — these words are artifacts that tell you the mindset and squeamish taboos of a certain milieu during a certain time period. I wanted the English in the book to be a hyperbole of that everyday dynamism of spoken English." [3]
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning , published in 2020 by One World, was Hong's first non-fiction book. It can be considered a memoir and autobiographical to a certain extent. [12] Organized around seven essays and addressing different acts of racial discrimination, Minor Feelings uses Hong's life experiences and feelings to demonstrate what it is like living as part of a marginalized community in the capitalist United States of America. [13] The book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. [14] [15] In 2021, Greta Lee and A24 were reported to be working on an adaptation of the book. [16]
Other awards include a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. [4]
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and Catholic. She was a member of the Secular Franciscan Order or Third Franciscan order. She was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. Her image is featured on the 5,000 Chilean peso banknote.
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a BA in French and an MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance since the 1970s and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.
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jubilat is a widely distributed, highly acclaimed American poetry and prose journal headquartered at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. First published in 2000, it was founded by Rob Casper, Christian Hawkey, Michael Teig and Kelly LeFave. From its first issue onward, jubilat has aimed to publish what's most alive in contemporary American poetry, and to place it alongside selections of reprints, found pieces, prose of various kinds, art, and interviews with poets and other artists.
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Marjorie Welish is an American poet, artist, and art critic.
Reetika Gina Vazirani was an Indian-American immigrant poet and educator.
Cathy Song is an American poet who has won numerous awards including the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She uses her heritage, coming from an Asian American culture, as the key compartment for her work.
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Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kim Hyesoon (Korean: 김혜순) is a South Korean poet. She was the first woman poet to receive the Kim Su-yeong Literature Award, Midang Literary Award, Contemporary Poetry Award, and Daesan Literary Awards. She has also received the Griffin Poetry Prize (2019), the Cikada Prize, the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in the Arts (2022), U.K Royal Society of Literature International writer (2022), and National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. She is the first foreign poet laureate to win the award.
Dance Dance Revolution is a 2007 book of poems by American author Cathy Park Hong. The poems are transcriptions of interviews conducted by the narrator, only referred to as the Historian, of her tour guide in the fictional city called, the Desert. In the year 2016, when the Historian visits the Guide, the Desert is a place of constant movement; with people from all over the world flowing in and out of the Desert every second of the day, its language consists of words from over 300 different languages and dialects with nothing ever at rest. As a result, the Guide's speech is full of words from different languages, mostly, English (slang), Korean, Spanish, and Latin.
Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles. She won the Kundiman Poetry prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies for her book Split.
Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is a 2020 autobiographical book of essays written by the Korean American author Cathy Park Hong. It was published by Penguin Random House in the United States and Profile Books in the United Kingdom and is composed of seven essays about growing up as an Asian-American in a Western capitalist society, more specifically in the United States of America. This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography in 2020.
Un Sio San is a Chinese poet and writer from Macau. She has published six collections of poetry, and her work has won several honors, including the inaugural New Star–People's Literature Prize of Poetry in China, and the Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry Fellowship.
Eye Level: Poems is a 2018 debut poetry collection by Jenny Xie. It was published by Graywolf Press after Juan Felipe Herrera selected Xie's manuscript for the Walt Whitman Award in 2017. After publication, the book was nominated for several awards and won a few prizes including the Levis Reading Prize.
Tamiko Beyer is an American writer, editor, and activist. She is the author of several books, including Last Days, a poetry collection that won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and Poetry as Spellcasting, an anthology co-edited with Destiny Hemphill and Lisbeth White.
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