Authors Hyeseung Song and Elissa Altman: Writing the Memoir

First-generation Korean American painter and the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl Hyeseung Song will be in conversation with Elissa Altman, the author of Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create. In celebration of Docile's paperback launch, the two authors will discuss topics important to the memoirist, including portraying family dynamics such as the mother-daughter relationship, finding the courage to tell their stories, as well as realizations the writers had before and after publication of their memoirs.

Hyeseung Song is a first-generation Korean American painter and the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl. Docile has been called a "savagely beautiful memoir" by David Henry Hwang, a "revelation" by Chloé Cooper Jones and was named a "Best Book" by Apple and “Most Anticipated” by Electric Literature, BookRiot and more. Raised in Texas, Song studied philosophy at Princeton and Harvard Universities, and painting at the Grand Central Atelier in New York City. A two-time Greenshields award winner, TedX speaker, and resident artist of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Vermont Studio Center and the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program, Song has also taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is at work on her first novel. Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man’s Feast, and the bestselling essay substack of the same name. A longtime editor, she has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, and her work has appeared in publications including Orion, The Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, “Feeding My Mother,” ran for a year. Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of permission, storytelling, and creativity, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publishers, Kripalu, Truro Center for the Arts, Rutgers Community Writing Workshop, and beyond, and lives in Connecticut with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.