Ocean Vuong

Author

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet and novelist whose luminous, deeply personal work has established him as one of the most important literary voices of his generation. Born in Saigon in 1988, he came to the United States at the age of two with his family, who settled in Hartford, Connecticut. He attended Pace University and... earned his MFA from New York University. Vuong's debut poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award, establishing him as a major poetic talent. His first novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, written as a letter from a son to his illiterate mother, became a bestseller and was praised as one of the finest debut novels of the decade. His second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother, and his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, continue his exploration of memory, migration, family, violence, and tenderness. Vuong was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and teaches at NYU. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers writing of extraordinary beauty and emotional precision — work that makes language feel new and transforms personal history into universal poetry. Read more Show less