The Loft Hour: Cathy Park Hong + Timmia Hearn DeRoy

Cathy 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. http://cathyparkhong.com/index.html.

Timmia Hearn DeRoy is a practitioner and scholar of social justice-based theatre and film. She was a founding member of the Trinidad and Tobago PRIDE Arts Festival, former Director of the School for the Arts at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, the Caribbean’s oldest theatre company, and former Marketing Manager at the CaribbeanTales International Film Festival. She works in areas of post-colonial theater practice, transnational feminist praxis, and Disability Justice, and engages in community-oriented and social change focused theater across the Diasporas to which she belongs. Timmia’s directing credits include 10,000: A One-Woman New Play Development by Victoria Taurean (2020) at the Lawrence Arts Center, In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks (2019) at the KU University Theatre, an original I Am One musical comedy called Buss de Mark (2016) which premiered at the PRIDE Arts Festival in Trinidad, and more. Timmia holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Kansas, and a B.A. in Theatre Studies from Yale University. You can see her work at TimmiaHearn.com.

Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS), and an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies, Film & Media, and Folklore. She is the 2020-2025 craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media. She researches histories and theories of new media, film and television, social media, fan studies, piracy studies, cultural memory, and archive studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies. De Kosnik is currently writing a book on media piracy in the U.S. by queer and BIPOC users tentatively titled Minority Piracy. She is faculty co-organizer of The Color of New Media, a working group that focuses on the overlap of critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and transnational studies with new media studies (sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender with additional support from BCNM). De Kosnik is Filipina American.