Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong (born , ; born October 14, 1988) is an American poet, essayist, novelist and photographer. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Fellowship the same year. He is the recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Early life and education Vương Quốc Vinh was born on October 14, 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to a multiracial mother and Vietnamese father of Chinese descent. His Vietnamese given name is taken from Hong Kong entertainer Leslie Cheung, whom Vuong's father was a fan of.

Vuong's maternal grandmother grew up in rural Vietnam, and his maternal grandfather, a man from Michigan, was serving in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War when he met and fell in love with Vuong's grandmother. They married and had three daughters, one of whom was Vuong's mother. His grandfather had gone back to visit family in the U.S., and was unable to return when Saigon fell to communist forces; his grandmother then placed his mother and her sisters in separate orphanages. Along the Connecticut River in South Glastonbury are the tobacco farms, which many teenagers worked as summer jobs for cash under the table in the summers. He was reunited with his maternal grandfather later in life.

While in high school, Vuong told fellow Glastonbury graduate Kat Chow, he "understood he had to leave Connecticut." After spending some time studying at Manchester Community College, he transferred to Pace University in New York City to study international marketing. His time there lasted only a few weeks before he realized it "wasn't for him." While at Brooklyn College, Vuong received an Academy of American Poets College Prize. Vuong went on to earn an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University.

In 2022 Vuong went on to receive an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke College. He gave the commencement speech for the college's 185th commencement on May 22.

Career

Vuong's poems and essays have been published in various journals, including Poetry, The Nation, TriQuarterly, Guernica, The Rumpus, Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

His first chapbook, Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press), was a 2011 "Over The Rainbow" selection for notable books with LGBT content by the American Library Association. His second chapbook, No (YesYes Books), was released in 2013. His debut full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2016. His first novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published by Penguin Press on June 4, 2019. This novel achieved great success, being longlisted for several major honors, including the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. It was also shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and ultimately won the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction. The novel is written in epistolary form from a son in his adulthood to his illiterate mother. It dives into their complicated relationship, confronting issues of race, class, trauma, and masculinity. The novel explores how storytelling can heal as well as give voice to what has been silenced. Vuong's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer three months before the publication of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. After his mother died in 2019, Vuong began writing his second collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, which has been described as a "search for life after the death of his mother."

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous has generated controversy. The question has been asked whether some of its content is pornographic. After protest from an online group, the International School Ho Chi Minh City had taken back 19 copies of the book from students, to whom the book had been handed out.

In August 2020, Vuong was revealed as the seventh writer to contribute to the Future Library project. The project, which compiles original works by writers each year from 2014 to 2114, will remain unread until the collected 100 works are eventually published in 2114. Discussing his contribution to the project, Vuong opined that, "So much of publishing is about seeing your name in the world, but this is the opposite, putting the future ghost of you forward. You and I will have to die in order for us to get these texts. That is a heady thing to write towards, so I will sit with it a while."

Vuong has stated his view of fiction as a moral vehicle. Discussing On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, he said: "Fiction is strongest when it launches a moral question. When it goes out and seeks to answer. The questions that we couldn't ask in life because the costs would be too much. Fiction and narrative art give us a vicarious opportunity to see these questions play out, at no true cost to our own."

He served as the 2019–2020 Artist-In-Resident at NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute, also working with the school's Center for Refugee Poetics and the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House. In 2022, he became a tenured Professor of Creative Writing at NYU, and has also taught in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2022, Vuong was named as one of "32 Essential Asian American Writers" by BuzzFeed Books. The novel was an Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection on publication, and received largely favorable reviews, with Maureen Corrigan calling it "a truly great novel about work." However, Tom Crewe in the London Review of Books lambasted it as "one of the worst ordeals of my reading life," criticizing it and Vuong's first novel for their "ridiculous, sententious" writing, "slight" plots, and "cartoon characters."

Personal life Vuong has described himself as being raised by women. During a conversation with a customer, his mother, a manicurist, expressed a desire to go to the beach, and pronounced the word "beach" as "bitch". The customer suggested she use the word "ocean" instead of "beach". After learning the definition of the word "ocean" — the most massive classified body of water, such as the Pacific Ocean, which connects the United States and Vietnam – she renamed her son Ocean. Vuong wrote Time Is a Mother while in mourning. According to Vuong, the collection of poems is the search for life after this heartbreaking event.

In November 2021, an excerpt from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was featured in that year's New South Wales Higher School Certificate exams. The paper, the first of two English exams taken by year twelve students in the Australian state, required examinees to read an excerpt from the novel and answer a short question responding to it. On the exam's conclusion, Australian school students bombarded Vuong with confused inquiries via Instagram, to which the author responded in humorous fashion. In one comment, in response to the mother of a student requesting more information about the excerpt, Vuong replied by asking, "Don’t y’all have Spark Notes in Australia?" Later, relating his own story, Vuong said: “For what it’s worth, I didn’t get into ‘uni’ either out of high school. I went to a local community college where I did some of my best learning.”

Vuong is gay and is a practicing Zen Buddhist. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his partner, Peter Bienkowski, and his half-brother whom he took in after their mother died. In light of the Gaza genocide, he has been a supporter of the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals.

Social activism Vuong has spoken publicly about his role in social activism. For example, he supported boycotts of Israeli publishers and literary festivals during the Gaza genocide. Not only has he participated in social activism, he has talked about literature’s relationship to politics and social issues. In interviews, he stated that literature is inherently political because storytelling influences how history is understood and remembered. He focused on expressing how language can be used to manipulate public memory, especially when it comes to political messaging. He used the “Make America Great Again” slogan as an example of “linguistic hallucinations”, which create unrealistic or dangerous remembrances of the past. Through his writing and teaching, Vuong tries to encourage people to question the dominant narratives that shape cultural discourse. He encourages his students to question the conventional ideas about language and narrative, and he describes this approach as a way to challenge limiting assumptions and broaden creative expression. He often draws from his own lived experiences, such as being a queer refugee learning to navigate language, family, and loss, and uses these as inspiration for his works. Vuong first established himself in poetry with his poetry chapbook Burnings (2010) before he reached international recognition with Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), which was the first full length poetry collection that he published. He then turned to fiction with the release of his debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). This switch from poetry to fiction expanded his audience and established him as a literary voice in contemporary American writing.

Following the huge success of his debut novel, Vuong released a second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother (2022), which was written during his grief process of his mother’s death. Most recently, in 2025, he released his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, which explores themes of aging and mental health.

Below are some of the major themes that can be seen throughout his work:

Identity: queer and refugee As stated, Vuong uses a lot of his personal experiences as inspiration for his works. Being a queer refugee, this journey of understanding and accepting this identity is a theme Vuong talks about in a lot of his work. Some scholars argue that in his writing, Vuong “foregrounds character over identity”. These American ideals frequently diverge from Vuong’s own experiences and those represented in his characters, particularly in relation to sexuality, migration, and Vietnamese American identity.

Critics have noted that Vuong’s writing frequently employs non-linear structures and stylistic experimentation that depart from conventional English narrative forms. These experimentations reflect the experiences of refugees and immigrants who are learning English for the first time. Through this approach, Vuong challenges dominant assumptions about standardized English and expands the range of voices and experiences represented in contemporary literature.

Writing style Critics have noted Vuong's blending of poetic and prose techniques. Hua Hsu, writing in The New Yorker, observed that Vuong's approach to English reflects his experience learning the language as an immigrant. He defined intersectional poetics as a type of writing style that brings together different parts of identity at once. In Vuong’s writing, he brings together race, sexuality, and refugee status together, rather than separating them.

Hardcover:

Copper Canyon Press Paperback: Hardcover:

Penguin Press Paperback: Hardcover:

Sibling Rivalry Press Paperback:

YesYes Books Paperback:

Verse

Title Year Publisher 12 Gauge 2013 The Paris-American DetoNation 2014 Poetry Aubade with Burning City Kissing in Vietnamese 2014 Split This Rock On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous 2014 Poetry Trojan 2015 Narrative Magazine Waterline No One Knows the Way to Heaven Someday I'll love Ocean Vuong 2015 The New Yorker Two Boys Bathing During a Ceasefire 2015 The New Republic Tell Me Something Good 2015 Academy of American Poets Trevor 2016 BuzzFeed News Toy Boat 2016 Poetry A Little Closer to the Edge Scavengers 2016 The New Yorker Ode to Masturbation 2016 Split This Rock Essay on Craft 2017 Poetry You Guys 2017 Granta Dear Rose 2017 Harper's Magazine Almost Human 2019 The New Yorker Not Even This 2020 Poetry Reasons for Staying 2021 Harper's Magazine Beautiful Short Loser 2022 Granta

Prose and essays Title Year Publisher The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation 2014 The Rumpus Beginnings: New York 2015 The Adroit Journal Surrendering 2016 The New Yorker A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read 2017 How I Did It: The Seventh Circle of Earth 2017 Poetry School How Can We Make the MFA Workshop More Hospitable to Writers of Color? 2018 Literary Hub Reimagining Masculinity 2019 The Paris Review The 10 Books I Needed to Write My Novel 2019 Literary Hub

Television Year Programme Channel Role Notes 2016 PBS NewsHour PBS Himself Vietnamese American Poet Contemplates His Personal Ties to the War 2019 Late Night with Seth Meyers NBC Season 6, Episode 111 Vice News Tonight HBO Ocean Vuong 'Breaks Apart' The Immigrant Experience in His Debut Novel Amanpour & Company PBS Ocean Vuong on Race, Sexuality and His New Novel

Awards and honours As of 2024, Vuong has won, received a nomination, or was considered for literature awards as well as career awards for fellowship and grant, residences, and listicles. His book The Emperor of Gladness was added to the Oprah's Book Club in May 2025.