| Cathy Song | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 20, 1955 Wahiawa, Hawaii |
| Occupation | Poet, creative writing professor |
| Nationality | American |
| Ethnicity | Chinese and Korean |
| Alma mater | Boston University - (Master's degree, 1981) |
| Period | 1982–present |
| Genres | Poetry |
| Notable work(s) | Picture Bride |
| Notable award(s) | Yale Younger Poets Award, 1982; Shelley Memorial Award; Hawaii Award for Literature |
| Children | 3[1] |
Cathy Song (born August 20, 1955) is an Asian-American poet. She is the 1982 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her collection Picture Bride. Song now resides in Kahala, Hawaii.
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Song was born in Wahiawa, Hawaii. She was the second of three children born to Ella, an immigrant from China who was a seamstress, and Andrew Song, who is Korean, and worked as an airline pilot.[2][3][4][5] In 1962, when she was 7 years old, the family relocated to Honolulu. Song graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelor's degree in 1977 and from Boston University in 1981 with a master's degree in Creative Writing.
While living in Boston, she married Douglas Davenport, then a physician-in-training. In 1984, they moved to Colorado for Davenport's medical training and settled back to Hawaii in 1987. The couple have three children.[6]
Song was associated with the Hawaii literary journal Bamboo Ridge from its early days in 1978, and continues to collaborate with writers from that community.[1] Her first book of poetry, Picture Bride (1983), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. In choosing Song's first book for the Yale Series, Richard Hugo wrote, "Her poems are flowers: colorful, sensual, and quiet, and they are offered almost shyly as bouquets to those moments in life that seemed minor but in retrospect count the most. She often reminds a loud, indifferent, hard world of what truly matters to the human spirit."[7]
In 1993, Song won the Hawaii Award for Literature.[8] That same year, the Poetry Society of America awarded Song the Shelley Memorial Award. In the early fall of 1994, she was invited to travel to Korea and Hong Kong under the United States Information Agency's Arts America program. In 1997, Song was one of the recipients of the annual Literature Awards ($20,000), awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.[9]
as of March 2008: