Ocean Vuong

2016 Winner in
Poetry

Ocean Vuong is the author of the novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019) and a collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Night Sky with Exit Wounds was a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016 and winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Vuong’s honors include a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and The Academy of American Poets. Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst.

Photo Credit:
Willy Somma
Reviews & Praise

"[A] masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence." ―Buzzfeed Books [on Night Sky With Exit Wounds]

"Vuong's powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity―all with a tremendous humanity." ―Slate [on Night Sky With Exit Wounds]

"A haunting and fearless debut." ―Publishers Weekly [on Night Sky With Exit Wounds]

"What a treasure [Ocean Vuong] is to us. What a perfume he's crushed and rendered of his heart and soul. What a gift this book is.” ―Li-Young Lee [on Night Sky With Exit Wounds]

Selected Works

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From the Selection Committee

What a pleasure to behold how Ocean Vuong writes with such attention to the inside of our ears, the aural island. This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level. His collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, forms an autobiography of sorts, tracing relationships with fathers, mothers, and lovers, and with a country that Vuong left when he was a young boy. The imagery in his work is often shimmeringly beautiful, but it’s cut through by intimations of violence and its after effects. The collection is a stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world.

Outside Links
Reading (Youtube)
Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong (New Yorker)
Profile (Poetry Foundation)
Eurydice (The Nation)