We are thrilled to celebrate the paperback release of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning with Cathy Park Hong and Charles Yu! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice. Donations will go to Black Lives Matter DC. You can order the book on our website to be automatically registered for the event, and there will also be an option to get the book during the event.

A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness and the struggle to be human.

"Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human."--Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times - The Washington Post - NPR - Time - New Statesman - BuzzFeed - Esquire - The New York Public Library - Book Riot

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’s book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings, was published in 2020 and is a finalist for the NBCC Autobiography Award. She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo'um. Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her prose and poetry have been published in the New York Times, New Republic, the Guardian, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a full professor at Rutgers-Newark University.

Charles Yu is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown, winner of the 2020 National Book Award. He has been nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Cathy Park Hong and Charles Yu for MINOR FEELINGS