Research Description

Cathy Park Hong a is Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science in the Department of English. 

Park Hong is a writer and poet who has published three volumes of poetry, with her creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings (2020) being both a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She was also named on Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list, as well as a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

A child of Korean parents, Park Hong grew up in Los Angeles before earning her B.A. from Oberlin College and MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Prior to coming to UC Berkeley, she was on the faculty at Rutgers University New Brunswick where she taught a course on the craft of poetry.