In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong from Portland Arts & Lectures in January 2022. Hong became nationally famous in the spring of 2020 for her essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, a book so searing and powerful it landed her on the cover of Time magazine’s 2021 issue featuring the 100 most influential people in the world.

Minor Feelings is a collection of seven essays is both a deeply personal account of Hong becoming—and being—an artist, and is also an account of her and her family’s experience as Korean Americans in this country. But she has emphasized that this is a book about America, not necessarily about being Asian. It is also a book infused with her sensibility as a poet, as someone who is fascinated with the endless mutability and power of language. Hong has published three acclaimed collections of poetry, and many listeners who know and have read Minor Feelings might be surprised to learn she primarily identifies as a poet not as an essayist.

The theme of her talk is “community and belonging” and she threads a narrative through pop culture, religion, autobiography, and 20th century history, in order to try to understand the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic, and the broader discrimination so many Americans experience in their daily lives. That she does this with anger, humor, and tenderness speaks to her remarkable powers as a writer and speaker.

Cathy Park Hong is the author of three poetry collections and Minor Feelings, a New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. 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, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at Rutgers University–Newark.

This week features a conversation on humor in fiction featuring two masters of the genre: Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Thingas and, most recently, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, the story of a lesbian clown navigating life, love, and art in Florida; and Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins and, most recently, So Far Gone, about a journalist living off the grid who is forced back into society to help his grandchildren. The conversation is moderated by OPB’s Jess Hazel, host of Morning Edition.

As they discuss, Jess and Krisetn are both writers of place, and are often writing about people who might be thought of as outsiders or marginal. Kristen is a Florida writer, by her own description everything she writes is about Florida, specifically Orlando and Central Florida. And Jess ranges in his work but often, including in So Far Gone, returns to the American Northwest, here to the Eastern Northwest; he also delivers a defense of Spokane, his birthplace and long-time hometown.

The episode starts with the author’s favorite knock-knock jokes, both of which are very personal choices and give some insight into what these funny writers find funny.

What comes through as a primary connection between Jess and Kristen’s work is their fascination with people. Writing is a way to try to better understand people, including people drastically different from the writer, which is a deeply empathetic project. Humor is a way to understanding other people and to connecting with people across some of the things that might seem to divide us.

Kristen Arnett is the author of the novel With Teeth, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction, and the New York Times bestselling novel Mostly Dead Things, which was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Orlando, Florida.

Jess Walter is the author of eleven books, most recently the novels So Far Gone, The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins; The Zero, a finalist for the National Book Award and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His work has been published in 34 languages and his short fiction has won O. Henry and Pushcart prizes, appeared three times in Best American Short Stories, and is collected in the books The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water. Walter lives in Spokane, Washington.

Jess Hazel has hosted Morning Edition for OPB since 2024. They graduated with a BA in Journalism at the University of Montana and have previously hosted Morning Edition in Montana and Southern Colorado. Hazel has a voracious appetite for stories and treasures books that make them laugh, cry or cringe.

Portland Book Festival has been a proud partner of the National Book Foundation Presents program for many years now, and at the 2025 festival we featured a program called “The Cost of Hope,” moderated by National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey, and featuring 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction winner Jason De Leon, author of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, and 2025 National Book Award finalist in Fiction Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief.

The intersections between Jason’s book, in which he embeds with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years, and Megha’s novel, about two families in a climate-ravaged near-future Kolkata, are abundant. In fact, the two authors share a background in anthropology, and talk about how that education has shaped the way they interpret the world.

Their wide-ranging conversation starts with a discussion of how hope can be “snarling and aggressive,” and idea of hope as a refusal to back down. They also talk about the ways both of their stories connect climate change and migration, and how inescapable that connection is. In different ways; for Jason, through reporting, and for Megha, through fiction, both books are able to interrogate huge systems through the individual lives, making these incomprehensible forces in the world legible by finding the storytelling.

This is a conversation between two artists thinking deeply about some of the most pressing issues of the day, and approaching them from places of care and, indeed, ultimately, from places of hope.

Jason De León is professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies and Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a 501(c)(3) research, arts, and education collective that seeks to raise awareness about migration issues globally while also assisting families of missing migrants reunite with their loved ones. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and author of the award–winning books The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail and Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, which was Longlisted for the National Book Award, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and holds degrees in Anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Catapult Books, and lives in New York. A Guardian and A Thief is her second novel.

Ruth Dickey has spent 30 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art, and is the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington DC, and a grant from the DC Commission and Arts and Humanities, Ruth is the author of Our Hollowness Sings (Unicorn Press, 2024), and Mud Blooms (Harbor Mountain Press, 2019), and an ardent fan of dogs and coffee.

CW: The podcast version of this episode is uncensored and contains strong language. Listener discretion is advised!