Looking Back on a Life

The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and the Eureka Springs Carnegie Library are pleased to present a reading by authors Hannah Bae and Ava Arsaga titled, “Looking Back on a Life.” The reading is free to the public and will be held from 4:03 – 5:30 pm on Wednesday, July 21, in the garden at the Eureka Springs Carnegie Library located at 188 Spring Street (South of the Carnegie Library Gardens Building).  Hannah will read from two personal essays about connecting to her family history and Korean culture through the lens of film, including recent Academy Award winner Minari, which is set in the Ozarks. She will be joined by author Ava Arsaga. The reading will be followed by a Q&A session and an interactive discussion on the power of storytelling, the process of excavating family history, the treasure that is Northwest Arkansas, and more.

Ava Arsaga runs Arsaga's Coffee Roasters in Fayetteville, Arkansas alongside her family and is in the process of starting a new artist's residency program in Northwest Arkansas. A graduate of The Evergreen State College with a Bachelor of Science, she writes, draws, observes, thinks, and lives her life. Her short story, "New Sugar," made the Glimmer Train Top 25 list in the May/June 2018 Short Story Award for New Writers contest.

Hannah is the winner of the 2019 Real People, Real Struggles, Real Stories fellowship. While she is in Eureka Springs for her fully funded, two-week residency at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, she will be working on her memoir-in-progress, “Way Enough,” which confronts issues of class, race, and the stigma surrounding mental illness in Korean culture. Hannah hails from Brooklyn, NY, but she has deep ties to NWA as her husband was born and raised Fayetteville, where her in-laws currently live. She is charmed and inspired by the natural beauty and thriving creative community of the Ozark foothills.

The winner of the 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award for nonfiction, Hannah Bae worked for 10 years in newsrooms before she decided to take the plunge, quit her job at CNN, and pursue her creative passion of telling stories about Korean American culture and identity. Her work has been published in the books “(Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation About Mental Health”and “The Monocle Travel Guide, Seoul.” She has received recent fellowships from The Kenyon Review, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and The Poynter Institute.

While she was in the world of breaking news, she worked full-time for CNN Business, Newsday, and the US State Department. She started her journalism career in Seoul on a Princeton-in-Asia fellowship that led to full-time editor positions at some of South Korea’s largest news organizations and freelance work with the Associated Press, CNN Travel, the German press agency Deutsche Presse Agentur, and other clients. A longtime volunteer and leader within Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), she was named Chapter President of the Year in 2019 for her service in New York. Learn more about Hannah at www.hannahbae.com.

The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow would like to thank long-time supporter and board member Sharon Spurlin for generously funding the Real People, Real Struggles, Real Stories: Writing About Mental Illness fellowship.  For more information about funding a fellowship, please visit www.writerscolony.org/product-page/fund-a-fellowship.