Please join us for a conversation & book signing for MINOR FEELINGS by Cathy Park Hong. Cathy will be joined in conversation by Eula Biss.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections including Dance Dance Revolution , chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Engine Empire. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, 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.

Eula Biss is the author, most recently, of On Immunity: An Inoculation , which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Her second book, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays , won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 2010. Her first book, The Balloonists, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2002. Her writing has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Jaffe Writers’ Award. She holds a B.A. in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and a M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her essays have recently appeared in The Believer, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine.

Accessibility: Our store is wheelchair accessible, however–there is a narrow hallway and sharp 90-degree turn on the way to our bathrooms. Seating is first-come, first-serve, but we are happy to reserve seats for people with disabilities. We have LED lighting that can be adjusted with dimmers. Please call the store at 773-769-9299 the day of the event if you need a reserved seat or have additional questions.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Cathy Park Hong, Chicago, Edgewater, Eula Biss, Women & Children First Bookstore