Ocean Vuong (born , ; born October 14, 1988) is an American poet, essayist, novelist and photographer. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Fellowship the same year. He is the recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize.
Early life and education Vương Quốc Vinh was born on October 14, 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to a multiracial mother and Vietnamese father of Chinese descent. His Vietnamese given name is taken from Hong Kong entertainer Leslie Cheung, whom Vuong's father was a fan of.
Vuong's maternal grandmother grew up in rural Vietnam, and his maternal grandfather, a man from Michigan, was serving in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War when he met and fell in love with Vuong's grandmother. They married and had three daughters, one of whom was Vuong's mother. His grandfather had gone back to visit family in the U.S., and was unable to return when Saigon fell to communist forces; his grandmother then placed his mother and her sisters in separate orphanages. As daughters of a US serviceman, they would have qualified for Operation Babylift, a program that evacuated children to the United States for adoption.
Vuong's mother gave birth to him at 18, already working in a hair salon in Saigon. However, her mixed-race heritage caught the attention of a policeman, who recognized that, under Vietnamese law, she was working illegally due to her background. This discovery forced the family to flee Vietnam for safety. They were evacuated to a refugee camp in the Philippines, and two-year-old Vuong and his family eventually gained asylum and migrated to the United States. They settled in Hartford, Connecticut, and Vuong grew up in the suburbs of Glastonbury, Connecticut, where he attended Glastonbury High School. He went by Vin or Vinny and was known for riding his bike everywhere. He was an avid basketball fan and often played pick-up basketball.
Vuong was the first in his family to achieve proficiency in reading and writing, learning to read at the age of eleven. He suspected dyslexia ran in his family. At 15 years old, Vuong worked on a tobacco farm illegally and would later describe his experiences on the farm in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Along the Connecticut River in South Glastonbury are the tobacco farms, which many teenagers worked as summer jobs for cash under the table in the summers. He was reunited with his maternal grandfather later in life.
Education Vuong attended Glastonbury High School in Glastonbury, Connecticut, a school known for academic excellence. "I didn't know how to make use of it," Vuong has stated, noting that his grade point average at one point was 1.7.
While in high school, Vuong told fellow Glastonbury graduate Kat Chow, he "understood he had to leave Connecticut." After spending some time studying at Manchester Community College, he transferred to Pace University in New York City to study international marketing. His time there lasted only a few weeks before he realized it "wasn't for him."
Vuong then enrolled at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he studied 19th-century English literature under poet and novelist Ben Lerner, and earned a BFA in Creative Writing . While at Brooklyn College, Vuong received an Academy of American Poets College Prize. Vuong went on to earn an MFA in poetry from New York University.
In 2022 Vuong went on to receive an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke College. He gave the commencement speech for the college's 185th commencement on May 22.
Career
Vuong's poems and essays have been published in various journals, including Poetry, The Nation, TriQuarterly, Guernica, The Rumpus, Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
His first chapbook, Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press), was a 2011 "Over The Rainbow" selection for notable books with LGBT content by the American Library Association. His second chapbook, No (YesYes Books), was released in 2013. His debut full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2016. His first novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published by Penguin Press on June 4, 2019. This novel achieved great success, being longlisted for several major honors, including the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. It was also shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and ultimately won the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction. While working on the novel, the biggest issue Vuong had was with grammatical tense, since there are no past participles in Vietnamese. Vuong also regarded the book as a "phantom novel" dedicated to the "phantom readership of the mother, of [his] family," who are illiterate and thus cannot read his book. The novel is written in epistolary form from a son in his adulthood to his illiterate mother. It dives into their complicated relationship, confronting issues of race, class, trauma, and masculinity. The novel explores how storytelling can heal as well as give voice to what has been silenced. Vuong's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer three months before the publication of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. After his mother died in 2019, Vuong began writing his second collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, which has been described as a "search for life after the death of his mother."
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous has generated controversy over objects that some of its content is pornographic. After protest from an online group, the International School Ho Chi Minh City had taken back 19 copies of the book from students, to whom the book had been handed out.
In August 2020, Vuong was revealed as the seventh writer to contribute to the Future Library project. Discussing his contribution to the project, Vuong opined that, "So much of publishing is about seeing your name in the world, but this is the opposite, putting the future ghost of you forward. You and I will have to die in order for us to get these texts. That is a heady thing to write towards, so I will sit with it a while."
Vuong has stated his view of fiction as a moral vehicle. Discussing On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, he said: "Fiction is strongest when it launches a moral question. When it goes out and seeks to answer. The questions that we couldn't ask in life because the costs would be too much. Fiction and narrative art give us a vicarious opportunity to see these questions play out, at no true cost to our own."
He served as the 2019–2020 Artist-In-Resident at NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute, also working with the school's Center for Refugee Poetics and the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House. In 2022, he became a tenured Professor of Creative Writing at NYU, and has also taught in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2022, Vuong was named as one of "32 Essential Asian American Writers" by BuzzFeed Books.
Vuong released a second novel titled The Emperor of Gladness on May 13, 2025. The novel was an Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection on publication, and received largely favorable reviews, with Maureen Corrigan calling it "a truly great novel about work." However, Tom Crewe in the London Review of Books lambasted it as "one of the worst ordeals of my reading life," criticizing it and Vuong's first novel for their "ridiculous, sententious" writing, "slight" plots, and "cartoon characters."
Personal life Vuong has described himself as being raised by women. During a conversation with a customer, his mother, a manicurist, expressed a desire to go to the beach, and pronounced the word "beach" as "bitch". The customer suggested she use the word "ocean" instead of "beach". After learning the definition of the word "ocean" — the most massive classified body of water, such as the Pacific Ocean, which connects the United States and Vietnam – she renamed her son Ocean.
Three months before On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was published, Vuong's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she died in November 2019. Vuong wrote Time Is a Mother while in mourning. According to Vuong, the collection of poems is the search for life after this heartbreaking event.
In November 2021, an excerpt from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was featured in that year's New South Wales Higher School Certificate exams. The paper, the first of two English exams taken by year twelve students in the Australian state, required examinees to read an excerpt from the novel and answer a short question responding to it. On the exam's conclusion, Australian school students bombarded Vuong with confused inquiries via Instagram, to which the author responded in humorous fashion. In one comment, in response to the mother of a student requesting more information about the excerpt, Vuong replied by asking, "Don’t y’all have Spark Notes in Australia?" Later, relating his own story, Vuong said: “For what it’s worth, I didn’t get into ‘uni’ either out of high school. I went to a local community college where I did some of my best learning.”
Vuong is gay and is a practicing Zen Buddhist. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his partner, Peter Bienkowski, and his half-brother whom he took in after their mother died.
Social activism
In light of the outbreak of the Gaza war and genocide, Vuong has been a supporter of the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals. Vuong was also a signatory to an open letter by the group Writers Against the War in Gaza dated October 27, 2023.
Speaking about the relationship between literature and politics, Vuong said that literature is inherently and "always" political, expressing how language can be used to manipulate public memory, especially when it comes to political messaging. He used the “Make America Great Again” slogan as an example of “linguistic hallucinations”, which create unrealistic or dangerous remembrances of the past.
Vuong also uses his platform to advocate for a greater representation of queer, refugee, and immigrant communities. He tries to challenge the limited ways these identities are portrayed or viewed in American culture. Through his writing and teaching, Vuong tries to encourage people to question the dominant narratives that shape cultural discourse. He encourages his students to question the conventional ideas about language and narrative, and he describes this approach as a way to challenge limiting assumptions and broaden creative expression.
Work
Ocean Vuong’s writing bridges personal and historical trauma through poetic and textual experimentation. He often draws from his own lived experiences, such as being a queer refugee learning to navigate language, family, and loss, and uses these as inspiration for his works. Vuong first established himself in poetry with his poetry chapbook Burnings (2010) before he reached international recognition with Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), which was the first full length poetry collection that he published. He then turned to fiction with the release of his debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). This switch from poetry to fiction expanded his audience and established him as a literary voice in contemporary American writing.
Following the huge success of his debut novel, Vuong released a second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother (2022), which was written during his grief process of his mother’s death. Most recently, in 2025, he released his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, which explores themes of aging and mental health. Across his poetry, essays, and fiction, Vuong consistently returns to a set of core themes that evolve across different works.