Hannah Bae
Nonfiction
Brooklyn, NY
Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist, nonfiction writer and illustrator who is working on a memoir about family estrangement and mental illness. She is the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writing Workshops. Her news bylines include The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Eater, Monocle, The AP and more, and she has worked full-time for CNN, Newsday, the U.S. State Department and other organizations. She has taught creative writing through the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, The Resort LIC and the Emerging Writers Festival. She is a public speaker at schools, conferences and literary events, and she is editor-at-large for the literary journal Pigeon Pages. Follow her work at her website hannahbae.com, on Twitter at @hanbae and on Instagram at @hannahbae.
“When I think of my family tree, all I can picture is the wreckage after a hurricane has blown through: a partially uprooted trunk, with whole limbs torn off at unnatural angles. Jagged emptiness left where names, places, and details should be. So many forces—colonization, war, poverty, illness—took their toll on my grandparents’ generation. In my parents’ lifetime, the unsightly gaps in the branches stem from the losses that can come with immigration—of homeland, of language, of extended family, and of a history that my father must have hoped to erase.”
Excerpt from “From Haunting to Healing: On the Gwangju Uprising and ‘Human Acts,’’’ Catapult, May 18, 2020.