THE FCC READERS GUILD
invites you to join our next virtual gathering!
BOOK FOR DISCUSSION:
MINOR FEELINGS
An Asian American Reckoning
By Cathy Park Hong
DATE and TIME: Friday, October 22, 7:30 pm EDT
Brilliant ... To read this book is to become more human.
—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
An incendiary book about a pressing social issue of the day ... With its mix of the personal and political, Minor Feelings is the kind of trenchant social critique that's bound to get people talking. —BuzzFeed
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
Register here by Wednesday, October 20 to receive a Zoom link to the conversation: www.fccny.org
Participation is free, but membership is required.
Adoptees, adoptive parents, and supporters are encouraged to join!
We look forward to seeing you there!
Mary Child and Diane Gnagnarelli
Questions/Comments: programs@fccny.org
ABOUT THE BOOK (from Amazon)
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
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 Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Boston 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.
