Join the Western Sullivan Library in conversation with local author & memoirist, Hyeseung Song. This event will be moderated by Melisse Gelula, the founder of Memoiring, a book club and writing community that hosts memorists such as Melissa Febos and Margo Steines for discussions and workshops.

HYESEUNG SONG is the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl. She is an American representational painter best known for large-scale figurative oil paintings and prints whose visual idioms toggle between resolution and fragmentation. Her work explores creativity, psychological incipience, and the life of the artist.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Song grew up in Texas and studied philosophy at Princeton and Harvard Universities. In her mid-twenties, she returned to her childhood passion of art, leaving academia to pursue painting at the Water Street Atelier, now the Grand Central Atelier, in New York City. After completing her studies, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant (twice) and began to exhibit in New York.

Song is a devoted teacher and has instructed at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Queens Council on the Arts’ High School 2 Art School Program as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, during which time she was named among Baltimore Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for her work creating synergies between the science and art communities in that city. She often addresses high school and college audiences, and was a featured speaker at Princeton University’s TedX Conference as well as at the Asian American Alumni Association of Princeton’s Leadership Conference.

She has received residencies at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists in Brittany, France, Penland School of Arts and Craft, the Vermont Studio Center as well as others, and her work resides in private collections internationally.

Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

Learn more on her website at https://hyeseungsong.com/

Melisse Gelula is the founder of Memoiring, a book club and writing community that hosts memorists such as Melissa Febos and Margo Steines for discussions and workshops. She’s also the co-founder and former Chief Creative Officer of Well+Good (acquired by Leaf Group in 2018), a pioneering media company, for which she was named one of 9 Most Creative Entrepreneurs by Inc. Magazine and one of 10 Writers and Editors Who Are Changing the National Conversation by Adweek. Melisse’s work and expertise has been featured in dozens of outlets, including the New York Times, Vogue, and Electric Literature, as well as on Good Morning America and CBS This Morning. She is the co-author of the Well+Good Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2019). She is currently writing a memoir about being raised by a child psychologist who starts to hear voices and just completed an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College. You can follow Melisse at https://memoiring.substack.com/ and on Instagram @MelisseJoy and @Memoir_ing.