Photo © Brett Hall Jones

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.

Hong's first book, Translating Mo'um (Hanging Loose Press, 2002) received a Pushcart Prize. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2007) was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize.

Hong's poetry evokes a sense of split identity and alienation from Anglo-American culture. Cal 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 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."

Hong's awards and honors include a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Village Voice Fellowship for Minority Reporters. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at the Queens MFA program in Charlotte, North Carolina. She also serves as poetry editor for jubilat magazine.