# Ocean Vuong

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

## Early life

Ocean Vuong was born in Hồ Chí Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), Vietnam to a multiracial mother. Two generations before Vuong was born, his grandmother was raised in the countryside of Vietnam. During this time, his grandfather, a farm boy from Michigan, was serving in the United States Navy. It was during the Vietnam War period that he fell in love with Vuong's grandmother, whom Vuong described as "an illiterate girl from the rice paddies."
His grandparents married and had three daughters, one of whom was Vuong's mother. His grandfather had gone back to visit home in the U.S. but was unable to return when Saigon fell to communist forces. Fearing for their safety, his grandmother made the difficult decision to place his mother and her sisters in separate orphanages. With the rising dangers associated with being seen as a collaborator, she believed splitting them up would give them the best chance for survival. “It was a humanitarian crisis, and there was more chance of them surviving like that,” he explains. His grandmother also worried they might be taken out of Vietnam.
As daughters of a US serviceman, they would have qualified for Operation Babylift—a program that evacuated children to the United States for adoption. If kept together, they might have also been viewed as a family unit, making them a target for dissidents seeking to leave the country. By separating them, she hoped to protect them from these risks and increase their chances of survival.
By the time the family was reunited, his mother had already reached adulthood. At 18, she had given birth to Ocean and was working in a Saigon salon, washing men’s hair to make ends meet. However, her mixed-race heritage caught the attention of a policeman, who recognized that, under Vietnamese law, she was working illegally due to her background. This discovery put the family at significant risk, forcing them to flee Vietnam for safety. The family was evacuated to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where they waited as the Salvation Army processed their resettlement claim. Two-year-old Vuong and his family eventually gained asylum and migrated to the United States. They settled in Hartford, Connecticut, along with seven relatives sharing a one-bedroom apartment. His father abandoned the family one day and never returned.
Vuong was the first in his family to achieve proficiency in reading and writing, learning to read at the age of eleven. He suspected dyslexia ran in his family. At 15 years old, Vuong worked on a tobacco farm illegally and would later describe his experiences on the farm in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. He was reunited with his paternal grandfather later in life.

## Education

Vuong attended Glastonbury High School in Glastonbury, Connecticut, a school known for academic excellence. "I didn't know how to make use of it," Vuong has stated, noting that his grade point average at one point was 1.7.
While in high school, he told fellow Glastonbury graduate Kat Chow he "understood he had to leave Connecticut." After spending some time studying at Manchester Community College, Vuong transferred to Pace University in New York to study marketing. His time at Pace lasted only a few weeks before he realized it "wasn't for him."
He then enrolled at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he studied 19th-century English literature under poet and novelist Ben Lerner, and earned his B.A. in English. 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.

## 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. While working on the novel, the biggest issue Vuong had was with grammatical tense, since there are no past participles in Vietnamese. Vuong also regarded the book as a "phantom novel" dedicated to the "phantom readership of the mother, of [his] family," who are illiterate and thus cannot read his book. 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."
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.
Vuong has announced a second novel titled The Emperor of Gladness, expecting a release in May of 2025.

## 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.
Three months before the novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was published, Vuong's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she died in November 2019. 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.
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. During the Israel–Hamas war, he is a supporter of the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals.