Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong (born 1988) is a Vietnamese-American poet and novelist whose work transforms the experience of war, migration, queer identity, and grief into some of the most celebrated writing of his generation. Born in Ho Chi Minh City, he arrived in the United States at age two as a refugee and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut in a family of tobacco workers. His debut poetry collection *Night Sky with Exit Wounds* (2016) won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award. His autofictional novel *On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous* (2019) — written as a letter from a son to his illiterate mother — became a New York Times bestseller and was translated into dozens of languages. He holds an MFA from New York University and teaches at UMass Amherst. His writing is distinguished by its lyrical compression, its tenderness toward the wounded body, and its refusal to make suffering beautiful without also making it true. Ocean Vuong lived b. 1988.