ABOUT OCEAN VUONG
Poet and writer whose debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in the year 2019. His poems and essays have been published in Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
He and his family migrated to the United States after fleeing Vietnam. They also spent time in a refugee camp in the Philippines. He was the first in his family to learn to read at the age of eleven.
As a teenager, he illegally worked on a tobacco farm. In 2017, he received a MacArthur Grant. He received the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, the 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize. He has amassed more than 340,000 followers on his ocean_vuong Instagram account.
His mother died of breast cancer in November 2019. He lived in Massachusetts with his partner Peter Bienkowski.
In 2019, he was a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers .
