Cathy park hong biography sample
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Cathy Park Hong
Born to Korean parents on August 7, 1976, Cathy Park Hong was raised in Los Angeles. She studied at Oberlin College before earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Park Hong’s most recent poetry collection is Engine Empire (W. W. Norton, 2013). Her debut, Translating Mo’um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002) received a Pushcart Prize, and Dance Dance Revolution (W. W. Norton, 2007) was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Adrienne Rich. She is also the author of the essay collection Minor Feelings (One World/Random House, 2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
Park Hong’s poetry evokes a sense of split identity and alienation from Anglo American culture. Calvin Bedient, in the Boston Review, characterized her writing as “brilliant, feisty, and formidable.” A review of her work in Rain Taxi Review of Books described Park Hong’s “meticulously honed, visceral poetic” as “simultaneously beau
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Cathy Park Hong is a poet, essayist and college lecturer, specialising in creative writing. She uses the technique of mixed language in some of her work where different languages are fused to create meaningful text, usually known as “code-switching”.
She was born on the 7th August 1976 in Los Angeles, the daughter of Korean parents. She grew up in Ohio, graduating from the Oberlin College there and then achieving an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In the following years her work has earned her Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program. She also won a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Hong realised early that she had a talent for writing poetry and, besides a number of published collections in book form, she has had her work featured in journals such as the Paris Review, A Public Space and Poetry. Her books include Translating Mo’um, published in 2002 and Engine Empire, in 2012. In 2007
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Cathy Park Hong: "I wanted to write to people like me, people who could be my kin. As I became more confident in the form, and the book, my idea of kin grew more inclusive and bigger."
This semester we were pleased to welcome Cathy Park Hong to the UC Berkeley Department of English as Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science. We spoke to her about poetry, AI and UC Berkeley as an intellectual homecoming.
Cathy Park Hong’s New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House and Profile Books (UK). Minor Feelings was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and earned her recognition on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list. She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for