Author
Ocean Vuong
Birth Date
October 14, 1988
(37 Years)
Associated Country
United States
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet, novelist, and essayist known for his lyrical writing and exploration of memory, identity, family, and trauma. Born in Vietnam and raised in the United States, Vuong grew up in a working-class immigrant family in Connecticut. He studied at Brooklyn College and later earned an MFA in poetry from New York University.
Vuong first gained major recognition as a poet with collections such as Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), which received widespread acclaim for its emotional intensity and reflections on war, migration, sexuality, and family history. He later achieved international success with On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), a semi-autobiographical novel written as a letter from a son to his mother. The book was praised for its poetic prose and examination of immigrant life, queerness, violence, and love.
In addition to poetry and fiction, Vuong has written essays and criticism and has taught creative writing at the university level. His work is celebrated for its lyrical language, vulnerability, and exploration of personal and historical trauma, establishing him as one of the most influential literary voices of his generation.
Vuong first gained major recognition as a poet with collections such as Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), which received widespread acclaim for its emotional intensity and reflections on war, migration, sexuality, and family history. He later achieved international success with On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), a semi-autobiographical novel written as a letter from a son to his mother. The book was praised for its poetic prose and examination of immigrant life, queerness, violence, and love.
In addition to poetry and fiction, Vuong has written essays and criticism and has taught creative writing at the university level. His work is celebrated for its lyrical language, vulnerability, and exploration of personal and historical trauma, establishing him as one of the most influential literary voices of his generation.
Books
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout...
Time Is a Mother 2022
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to...
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began...
In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph....