About Me

Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer who is at work on a memoir about what it takes to build a beautiful adult life after healing from childhood trauma, including family estrangement and mental illness. For 2024, she is a New York State Council on the Arts grantee and a juror in nonfiction for The Kirkus Prize. She was the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2022 and 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and a 2019 fellow at Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She has been hired to teach creative writing for Indiana University’s Writers Conference, Kundiman, Kweli International Literary Festival, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and The Resort LIC. She has received residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, The Peter Bullough Foundation, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and The Sue-Je Lee Gage Sunlit Residency.

Her work has been published in books including “Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing & Changing” (Simon & Schuster, 2022), “(Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation About Mental Health” (Algonquin Young Readers, 2018) and “The Monocle Travel Guide, Seoul” (food and drinks chapter co-editor/writer, 2018).

She is focused on stories about Korean American culture and identity, and in 2019, several of her essays received nominations for The Pushcart Prize. As a freelance journalist, she covers arts and culture, including books, for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews and other outlets.

Hannah has worked full-time for organizations such as CNN Business, Newsday and the U.S. 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 Washington Post, CNN, Monocle, Eater, The Associated Press and other clients.

Through 2018 and 2019, Hannah served as president of Asian American Journalists Association’s New York chapter, for which she was named AAJA National’s Chapter President of the Year in 2019. She was co-director of AAJA’s national mentoring program from 2017-2021. She volunteers with Womankind, a nonprofit that serves survivors of gender-based violence, and serves as a board member for the literary journal Pigeon Pages.

Hannah is also an illustrator whose work can be found on Goldthread, Tricycle.org, SupChina and EatDrinkDraw.com, the website she runs with her collaborator, Adam Oelsner. She lives in Brooklyn with her dog, Ramona.