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Ocean, a Vietnamese-American man with black undercut-styled hair, is wearing a striped shirt and single dangling earring as he looks at the camera.

Photo by Peter Bienkowski.

Artists

Ocean Vuong

He // Him // His

Poet and Writer

Northampton, Massachusetts

Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, published by Penguin Press in 2019 and forthcoming in thirty languages. A 2019 MacArthur Fellow and winner of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, Vuong is also author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, named one of The New York Times’ Top 10 Books of 2016 and winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Additional honors include fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, and Academy of American Poets.

His work has been featured in a range of publications, including Granta, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and American Poetry Review, which awarded the writer the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Foreign Policy magazine named Vuong one of 2016’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers; the same year, BuzzFeed Books listed him among “32 Essential Asian American Writers.” He has been profiled on NPR’s All Things Considered and the PBS NewsHour, as well as in Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Born in Saigon, Vuong lives in Northampton, MA, where he is an associate professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Donor -This award was generously supported by the USA Board of Trustees.

This artist page was last updated on: 09.03.2024

Ocean Vuong on Amanpour & Companythumbnail.

Christiane Amanpour interviewing Ocean Vuong on Amanpour & Company, 2019. PBS.

Video courtesy of PBS.

Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong

After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.

Poem by Ocean Vuong. Originally published in The New Yorker, 2015.