Bestselling Author Cathy Park Hong in Conversation with Chicago Journalist Monica Eng

On Thursday, November 4th at 7 PM, The Book Stall is proud to support a consortium of Chicago-area libraries as they present a virtual program with Cathy Park Hong, author of the New York Times bestselling book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Ms. Hong will be in conversation with Chicago journalist Monica Eng. Time Magazine featured Minor Feelings as one of the best books of 2020, referring to Hong as “an energetic and necessary voice in the dialogue surrounding racism in the U.S.”

More about the Book: Cathy Park Hong, the poetry editor of The New Republic and a full professor at Rutgers-Newark University, fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. This vulnerable, humorous, and provocative collection pursues vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity, and individuality. Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings,” which 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. Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate 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.

“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

More About the Author: Cathy Park Hong’s New York Times bestselling book Minor Feelings was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, 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, The New Republic, The Guardian, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.

About Conversation Partner Monica Eng: Ms. Eng, currently a reporter for Axios, worked at Chicago’s WBEZ-AM for eight years as the station’s “Curious City” reporter and spent 16 years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Before that she wrote and edited at the Daily Southtown and Chicago Sun-Times. Monica has won multiple writing awards and been nominated for the James Beard Award five times. She is a fourth generation Chicagoan whose children are fourth generation Chicago Public School graduates.