Reading Human Rights: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

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Program Description

Event Details

This discussion will take place IN-PERSON at HCLS, Miller Branch.  

Branch Location: 9421 Frederick Rd, Ellicott City, MD 21042  |  410.313.1950 (MAP)


Reading Human Rights is a monthly book discussion hosted by the Howard County Office of Human Rights & Equity and Howard County Library System. We read books that promote cultural awareness, diversity, equity.


Minor Feelings: an Asian American reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

“Minor Feelings is a major reckoning, pulling no punches as the author uses her life’s flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian American experience, one with cascading consequences.”—NPR

 

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness.

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. 

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 PoetryThe New York TimesThe Paris ReviewMcSweeney’sBoston 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. In 2021, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.

 

Please register with an email address to receive an immediate registration confirmation. Please note that your email may be shared with Howard County Office of Human Rights & Equity for communication related to this event.

Registered customers should place a hold request on the title using their library card in order to receive a copy to read before the discussion.  Availability of physical copies is not guaranteed.

 

 

This event is part of HCLS' Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month series. Find additional resources here.