Hannah Bae(she/her/hers)

Biography

Hannah is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer who is at work on a memoir about family estrangement and mental illness.

Her work has been published or is forthcoming 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 on 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 2020, she was the nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She was named a Peter Taylor fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops for 2021 and 2022. In 2019, several of her essays received nominations for The Pushcart Prize. She was a 2019 Open City fellow in narrative nonfiction at Asian American Writers’ Workshop. 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.

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

Hannah is also an illustrator whose work can be found on Goldthread, Tricycle, SupChina and EatDrinkDraw, the website she runs with her husband, Adam Oelsner. She and Adam live in Brooklyn, New York with their dog, Ramona.

Articles, Publications, and Appearances

Books

• Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing & Changing edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (Simon & Schuster) – illustrated/comics essay

• Don’t Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation on Mental Health edited by Kelly Jensen (Algonquin Young Readers) – essay titled ‘Survival Mode’

• The Monocle Travel Guide, Seoul edited by Tyler Brule and Andrew Tuck (Gestalten) – food and drinks chapter co-editor/writer

First-Person Pieces

• Finding a Way to My Father Through ‘Peppermint Candy’ – Catapult – May 18, 2021

• We Were Taken In the Night – Slice Magazine – Fall ’19 – Winter ’20

• Less Than Perfect: What I left off of my college admissions applications – Bitch Media – June 3, 2019

• The Cost of a Mother – Pigeon Pages – May 12, 2019

Audio

• Loud Slurp podcast with Ang Lee and Vicky Huang

• Episode #12 This Asian American Life: Don’t Call Me Crazy (One in a Billion with Mable Chan, December 2019)