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 beautiful and furiously anti-beautiful,” work that "manages to create a space for the irreducibility of meaning.”

Park Hong’s awards and honors include a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, a Village Voice Fellowship for Minority Reporters, and a 2018 Windham Campbell Prize.

Park Hong teaches at Rutgers University in Newark and also serves as the poetry editor for New Republic.