Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is a widely published poet, novelist, and essayist whose best-selling debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019. In that same year, Vuong received a MacArthur “Genius” grant for “works that explore the effects of intergenerational trauma, the refugee experience, and the complexities of identity and desire with eloquence and clarity.”
Vuong’s award-winning poetry collections, Time Is a Mother (2022) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), grapple with a range of issues, from personal and social loss to (in the publisher’s words) the “cost of being the product of an American war living in America.” As the reviewer of Night Sky with Exit Wounds put it in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vuong pushes back “against the inclination to let fear define the exile’s life.”
In “Surrendering,” an essay published in the New Yorker in 2016, Vuong looked back at his childhood immigration experience. He writes of himself as “an E.S.L. student from a family of illiterate rice farmers, who saw reading as snobby.… I spent my first five years in America surrounded, inundated, by the Vietnamese language. When I entered kindergarten, I was, in a sense, immigrating all over again, except this time into English.”
Vuong currently serves as professor of modern poetry and poetics in the MFA Program at New York University.
