Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is the author of the acclaimed poetry collections Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He is also the author of the novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019), which has been translated into 37 languages and was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut novel award. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and won the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction.

A 2019 MacArthur Fellow, his other honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, Vuong earned a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature from Brooklyn College and an MFA in Poetry from NYU. He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and serves as a tenured Professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at NYU.