Ocean Vuong in Conversation with Cathy Park Hong

Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong is the 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities.
Vuong is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), which was named one of the top ten books of 2019 by the Washington Post and has been translated into 37 languages. Vuong has also published two collections of poetry: Time is a Mother (2022) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His other honors include a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper's, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review.
Born in Saigon, Vuong came to the United States as a refugee with his family at the age of two and was raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working-class family of nail salon and factory laborers. He attended Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study international marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in English.
The novelist and poet Ben Lerner, Vuong's teacher at Brooklyn College, has said of him, "once in a while, you get a student who’s not testing to be a writer, but who is already one." Vuong went on to earn his MFA in poetry at New York University, where he now serves on the faculty as professor of creative writing.
Cathy Park Hong (English Department, UC Berkeley) is the author of poetry collections Engine Empire; Dance Dance Revolution, and Translating Mo'um, and a New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.