Ocean Vuong: Brooklyn College's Poet of Grief and Grace

Ocean Vuong Photo Credit: Tom Hines

A note from our founder

Our fourteenth tribute in this new chapter goes to a poet whose sentences can hold devastation and tenderness in the same breath. Ocean Vuong earned his degree at Brooklyn College, and he still writes from Brooklyn today, working in a lyrical register few contemporary writers can match.

From Ho Chi Minh City to Hartford

Ocean Vuong was born on October 14, 1988, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and raised by his mother and grandmother in Hartford, Connecticut, after his family immigrated to the United States as refugees. His early life was shaped by the lingering generational trauma of the Vietnam War and by his experiences growing up working-class and queer in America. He earned his BA in Nineteenth-Century English Literature from Brooklyn College and his MFA in Poetry from New York University.

Lyrical Beauty, Raw Grief

Vuong's writing is renowned for its extraordinary lyrical beauty, emotional vulnerability, and unflinching processing of grief, memory, intimacy, and the immigrant experience. Few contemporary writers manage to be this exposed on the page and this precise at the same time.

International Acclaim

Vuong achieved massive international acclaim with his debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and his 2019 New York Times-bestselling epistolary novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, structured as a letter from a young man to his illiterate mother.

Teaching and Life in Brooklyn

A recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, Vuong has also been awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and a Whiting Award. He previously taught in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and currently lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

Bibliography

Fiction

• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019) — His stunning debut novel, written in the form of a deeply intimate letter from a son nicknamed "Little Dog" to his mother, unearthing a family history rooted in Vietnam and exploring race, class, addiction, and first love.

Poetry

• Burnings (2010) — A rare, early chapbook examining themes of family, fire, and displacement.

  
  

• No (2013) — A chapbook selection capturing his early experimentation with form and somatic grief.

  
  

• Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) — His breakthrough, award-winning full-length poetry collection that masterfully laces together the cosmic and the deeply personal, centering on the legacy of war and the complexities of fatherhood.

  
  

• Time Is a Mother (2022) — A deeply moving collection written in the wake of his mother's death, searching for life and meaning among the artifacts of profound grief.

READ VUONG

Start with On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous for the book that made him famous, or Night Sky with Exit Wounds if you'd rather begin with the poetry that got him there first. Either way, it's worth remembering that a lot of this began at Brooklyn College, in the same borough he still calls home. Get the book.

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