Ocean Vuong writes fiction, poetry, and essays, and works as a photographer and professor. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than two million copies in 41 languages; it won the American Book Award, the Mark Twain Award, and the New England Book Award. His second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, was a finalist for the Dublin Literary Award. His poetry collections include Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Thom Gunn Award, and Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and is a National Book Award nominee. Time magazine named him one of its 100 Rising Cultural Influencers. 

Vuong was born in Saigon and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, in a working-class family of nail salon and factory laborers. He studied at Manchester Community College before briefly attending Pace University, then transferred to Brooklyn College, where he earned a BA in nineteenth-century American literature, and later completed an MFA in poetry at NYU. 

He is currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University for 2026-27, where he is working on an inter-genre project combining prose and photography that explores grief, masculinity, memory, and the history of Asian American photography. He splits his time between Western Massachusetts and New York City, where he is a Professor of Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU. 

The photograph of Ocean Vuong was taken by Gioncarlo Valentine.