Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong

About Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong, born on October 14, 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is an American poet, novelist and essayist. In 1990, when he was 18 months old his family moved to the United States, he and six other relatives immigrated to Hartford, Connecticut after spending a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines. He studied English literature with a B.A. at Brooklyn College, among others with Ben Lerner. He then completed his studies with an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University. In 2010 he made his debut with the chapbook of poems Burnings, which was followed by No in 2013 and Sky Night With Exit Holes three years later which won in 2016 the Whiting Prize in Poetry and the Forward Poetry Prize for the best debut collection. He also won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017 for the same collection. He is the author of a novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, an autobiographical work that explores the trauma linked to his origins. This autobiographical novel, published in 2019, is considered the best book of the year by the Washington Post and was a commercial success. Vuong's texts and poems have been published in many journals and magazines.
He lives in Northampton and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

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