Ocean Vuong

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

Early life

Vuong was born in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam. His grandmother grew up in the Vietnamese countryside, and his grandfather was a white American Navy soldier, originally from Michigan. His grandparents met during the Vietnam War, married, and had three children, including 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. His grandmother separated his mother and aunts in orphanages, concerned for their survival. They fled Vietnam after a police officer came to suspect that his mother was of mixed heritage, leaving her prone to discrimination by the regime's labour policies at the time.

Two-year-old Vuong and his family eventually arrived in a refugee camp in the Philippines before achieving asylum and migrating to the United States, settling in Hartford, Connecticut, alongside six relatives. His father abandoned the family after this. Vuong was reunited with his paternal grandfather later in life. Vuong, who suspects dyslexia runs in his family, was the first in his family to learn to read, at the age of eleven.

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 at a community college, Vuong headed to Pace University in New York to study marketing. His time there lasted only a few weeks before he understood 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 received his B.A. in English. He received his 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 on non-heterosexuality 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. As of April that year, the publisher ran a second printing. 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 isfamily," who are illiterate and thus cannot read his book.

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 lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is an associate professor in the MFA Program for Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, something he never thought he would do due to glossophobia. He is a Kundiman fellow. In fall of 2022, he will join New York University's Faculty of Arts & Science as Professor of Creative Writing.

Awards and fellowships

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.

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 openly gay, and is a practicing Zen Buddhist.

Bibliography

Novels

* ''On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous'' (Penguin Press, 2019). OCL
1052450975

Collections

* ''Night Sky with Exit Wounds'' (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). OCL
1023185217
* ''Time Is a Mother'' (Penguin Press, 2022). OCL
1313513180

Chapbooks

* ''Burnings'' (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010). OCL
1001862161
* ''No'' (YesYes Books, 2013). OCL
878505119

List of poems

See also

* LGBT culture in New York City
* List of LGBT people from New York City
* List of Vietnamese Americans

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Vuong, Ocean
1988 births
Living people
21st-century American poets
21st-century American essayists
American male essayists
American male poets
American writers of Vietnamese descent
American Buddhists
Brooklyn College alumni
American gay writers
LGBT people from New York (state)
American LGBT poets
People from Ho Chi Minh City
The New Yorker people
Vietnamese emigrants to the United States
21st-century American male writers
LGBT people from Vietnam
LGBT American people of Asian descent
LGBT people from Connecticut
T. S. Eliot Prize winners
American poets of Asian descent
21st-century American novelists
American male novelists
American Zen Buddhists
21st-century Buddhists
LGBT Buddhists
Buddhist poets
People from Glastonbury, Connecticut
Writers from Hartford, Connecticut