Cathy Park Hong Books In Order

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Cathy Park Hong is a popular Korean-American writer, professor, and poet. She has successfully published 3 volumes of poetry. A number of her works are available in serialized narrative and mixed languages. Author Hong was born to Korean parents in Los Angeles, California and was brought up there. She completed her graduation from Oberlin College and then obtained an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Hong is a winner of the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, NY Foundation of Arts Fellowship, 2018 Windham Campbell Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In addition to her writing interests, she is employed at Rutgers University for teaching creative writing.

Sarah Lawrence College has also employed her services as an associate professor. Also, Hong regularly attends the MFA Program at Queens in Charlotte, North Carolina as a faculty. Hong is also the New Republic’s poetry editor. In his summary about the poetic approach, J.P. Eburne has said that author Hong is dedicated to experimenting and expanding with a living art’s capacities. Her editing, writing, and other performances across different media seek to give rise to the interactive possibilities of poetry. She believes that it will be helpful in providing alternate options to live within an existing reality. Hong often wonders about the ways in which poetic praxis can be used to make social experiments. She thinks the poem is habitually entrenched for being a public encounter. So, she likes to make attempts to change this form of encounter.

The poem books written by author Hong include Dance Dance Revolution, Engine Empire, and Translating Mo’Um. Hong poems have featured in a number of literary magazines and journals, including Paris Review, Chain, A Public Space, Jubilat, McSweeney’s, The Nation, Yale Review, Poetry, Web Conjunctions, and several others. Also, the articles penned by Hong have appeared in publications such as Christian Science Monitor, New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and The Village Voice. In 2002, author Hong emerged as the winner of the Pushcart Prize for her debut book of poems called Translating Mo’Um. She is also the winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, which is won in 2006.

An excellent book written by author Cathy Park Hong in her career is entitled ‘Dance Dance Revolution’. It was released by the W.W. Norton Company publication in 2007. This book is the second poems’ book of Hong’s career. She has described the poems in the form of transcriptions of the interviews of the tour guide that the narrator conducted in a fictional city called the Desert. He is shown as the Historian. Initially, it is mentioned that the Historian meets the Guide in the Desert, a constant movement is taking place there. People from across the globe are coming in and going out of the city every second of every day. The language of the city consists of words taken from more than 300 different dialects and languages. Because of this, the speech of the Guide is filled with words of different languages. Most of her words come from Korean, Latin, English, and Spanish.

With the help of the Guide, the Historian travels to different hotels and streets in the Desert. Throughout the tour, the Guide keeps voicing her bitter blunt opinions about the city. As the tour continues, the Guide begins to change her course from describing the Desert to talking about her childhood spent in South Korea. A major part of her experience dates back to the time of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, which was a violent uprising that took place in Gwangju, South Korea in May 1980 against the rule of President Chun Doo Hwan, and how it affected the life of the South Korean people, including her.

As the story proceeds further, readers come to know that the Guide is a dissident from South Korea, who had aided the uprising along with her lover named Sah. In between the poems’ sections, the Historian has inserted excerpts from an imaginary memoir of her own. It mostly contains discussions of her childhood with her dad. The excerpts are provided in standard English and appear to be a relief from the Guide’s complicated language. Historian’s history fragments are seen paralleling the stages of the history of the Guide, which makes the book appear to be more like a whole story instead of 2 stories about 2 different characters. In the end, it is revealed that the Historian is the daughter of Sah and the Guide is the same lady who her father loved when they lived in South Korea.

Another successful book written by the author is known as ‘Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning’. It was published in February 2020. This book is an emotionally charged and ruthlessly honest exploration of an Asian American’s psychological condition. The book opens with the author’s statement that Asian Americans have a purgatorial status. They are neither black enough nor white enough and are unmentioned in a majority of the conversations related to racial identity. It is a popular belief about Asian Americans that they are high-achieving professionals. However, the reality is that there are more economic divisions among them than others. They consist of a tenuously allied people having their roots from East Asia to the Pacific Islands to South Asia and range from service industry laborers to tech millionaires.

The author wonders how to speak honestly about the condition of Asian-Americans if they do exist. Through this book, author Hong has provocatively and fearlessly confronted the thorny subject and has blended cultural criticism, memoir, and history. She has tried to expose the reality of radicalized consciousness prevalent in America. And by binding together the essays of this book, Hong has come up with the theory ‘minor feelings’. Having parents migrated from Korea, Hong’s life was filled with suspicion, melancholy, and shame as she grew up. She went on to understand it later that the minor feelings occur because of the American optimism contradicting one’s own reality. They also happen when an Asian American tends to believe all the lies that they are told about their racial identity. With the searching mind of a poet and sly humor, author Hong has provided an explanation of racial consciousness that is present in America in today’s generation. This devastating and intimate book traces Hong’s relationship with the English language, with depression and shame, with art-making and poetry, and female friendship and family.