Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong was born on October 14, 1988, in Saigon, immigrated to the United States at the age of two, and was raised in Hartford, Connecticut. He received a BA from Brooklyn College, where he was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize, and earned an MFA from New York University.

Vuong is the author of Time is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), which received the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection from the Forward Arts Foundation and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is also the author of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019), winner of an American Book Award and the New England Book Award for fiction.

Vuong has received numerous honors and awards, including a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. In 2019, he was named a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.