Hyeseung Song, 송혜승 (she/her), is a first-generation Korean American painter, writer and teacher. She is the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (Simon & Schuster, 2024) about an Asian American woman’s struggle with self-worth and mental illness. Docile was called “a savagely beautiful memoir” by David Henry Hwang and a “revelation” by Chloé Cooper Jones. The audiobook was a “Best” at Apple, and a Korean language edition released in 2025. 

Raised in Texas, Song studied philosophy, languages and creative writing at Princeton University. She pursued dual post-graduate degrees at Harvard, in law and philosophy, before dropping out to study painting in New York. A two-time Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant winner, TedX speaker and resident artist of The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Vermont Studio Center and the Klots International Program for Artists, Song has taught at the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, the Queens Council on the Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her paintings have been the subject of solo and group shows, and her work is held in private collections internationally. 

This summer, Song will at The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a Nonfiction Fellow. She is currently at work on a meta-memoir on the eternal question plaguing memoirists: that of the ethics of writing about those we love. At the center of Song’s exploration is a failure of translation—linguistic, psychological and literary, which she awoke to when her father unexpectedly died after the publication of her debut memoir.

Song splits her time between New York City and the western Catskills.