Ocean Vuong

Vietnamese-American poet and novelist whose debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a lyrical letter from a son to his illiterate mother.

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet and novelist whose work has established him as one of the most distinctive literary voices of his generation. Born in Ho Chi Minh City and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Vuong came to English as a second language and did not learn to read until he was eleven — a trajectory that perhaps explains the extraordinary care and attention he brings to each word.

His debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), takes the form of a letter from a young Vietnamese-American man named Little Dog to his illiterate mother — a letter she will never be able to read. The novel moves between the present and the past, tracing Little Dog’s childhood in a working-class New England town, his relationship with a dying tobacco farmer, and the long shadow cast by his family’s history with the Vietnam War and addiction. Written in Vuong’s luminous, prose-poem style, the book was both a critical sensation and a bestseller.

Before the novel, Vuong built his reputation as a poet of immense power. His debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Vuong teaches creative writing at New York University and continues to publish poetry and essays that grapple with beauty, violence, queerness, and belonging.