Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Cathy Park Hong in Conversation with Ijeoma Oluo

January 28, 2022 @ 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm PST

Seattle Arts & Lectures + LANGSTON Present:

Cathy Park Hong in Conversation with Ijeoma Oluo

Friday, January 28, 2022  | 7:30 pm PST

Free. Online & In-Person

Event Website

Our Existence Beyond Trauma

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

Hong will be in conversation with Our Existence Beyond Trauma Series curator, Ijeoma Oluo, for this event, which is co-presented by Langston Seattle.

Binding the essay of her most recent collection 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’s first book, Translating Mo’um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by W.W. Norton. Her third book of poems, Engine Empire, was published in Spring 2012 by W.W. Norton.

Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in A Public SpacePoetryParis ReviewConjunctionsMcSweeney’sAPRHarvard ReviewBoston ReviewThe Nation, and other journals. She is an Associate Professor at Sarah Lawrence College and is regular faculty at the Queens MFA program in Charlotte, North Carolina.

About Ijeoma Oluo

Ijeoma Oluo is a writer, speaker, and internet yeller. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race and most recently, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Her work on race has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among many other publications. She was named to the 2021 TIME 100 Next list and has twice been named to the Root 100. She received the 2018 Feminist Humanist Award and the 2020 Harvard Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

–from website

Details

Date:
January 28, 2022
Time:
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm PST
Website:
https://lectures.org/event/cathy-park-hong/

Organizer

LANGSTON
Email
info@langstonseattle.org
View Organizer Website

Venue

Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute
104 17th Ave South
Seattle, 98144 United States
+ Google Map