Minor Feelings: Reflections on America’s Racial Consciousness

Cathy Park Hong

Poet, Writer, Professor

Cathy Park Hong is an award-winning poet, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. In this widely celebrated book of essays, Hong provocatively infuses cultural criticism, history, and her own person experience to reveal hard truths about the American racialized consciousness. In engaging and revealing talks, Hong speaks about race and Asian American identity, utilizing the craft of poetry as a lens for social change, and the power of creating art that is influenced by politics, culture, and the current societal moment.

Minor Feelings is a radically honest meditation on the Asian American experience. Cathy Park Hong draws upon her background as a poet and the daughter of Korean immigrants to create a work that flows seamlessly between cultural analysis, personal anecdotes, and historical framework. Hong writes about how her upbringing was steeped in shame and self-loathing.

These “minor feelings,” she comes to understand in the book, were the result of believing the stereotypes that American society fed her about her own racial identity. Praised by Claudia Rankine, Jia Tolentino, and other prominent writers of our time, Minor Feelings is a critical work that reckons with our racialized past and present. Time named Minor Feelings as one of the top 10 Non-Fiction books of 2020.

Cathy Park Hong is also the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution (which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize), Engine Empire, and Translating Mo’Um. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The 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.