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. 

Song will be at The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference this summer as a Nonfiction Fellow. She is at work on a meta-memoir about the ethics of writing about other people, revision and the failure of translation-—linguistic, psychological and literary—that occurred after her father died unexpectedly after Docile’s publication.