Ocean Vuong Biography | Wiki
Ocean Vuong is a popular Vietnamese-American poet, essayist, and novelist who is the winner of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize due to his poetry. His first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was released in 2019. Ocean received a MacArthur Grant the same year. He works as a tenured Professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at NYU.
His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, as well as American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Chosen by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, he was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker. He was named as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” by Buzzfeed Books
Ocean Vuong Age
Ocean was born on October 14, 1988, in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam. He is 35 years old. Ocean celebrates his birthday on October 14, every year.
Ocean Vuong Height
He is a man of below-average stature. Ocean stands at a height of 5 ft 6 in ( Approx. 1.65m ).
Ocean Vuong Family
He was born in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam the son of Rose a single mother. Ocean’s grandmother grew up in the Vietnamese countryside, while his grandfather was a white American Navy soldier, originally from Michigan. Ocean’s grandparents met during the Vietnam War, married, and had three children, including his mother. His grandfather had gone back to visit home in the U.S. but was unable to come back when Saigon fell to communist forces. Ocean’s grandmother separated his mom and aunts in orphanages, concerned for their survival. The family fled Vietnam following a police officer who came to suspect that his mom was of mixed heritage, leaving her prone to discrimination by the regime’s labor policies at the time.
Two-year-old Ocean and his family finally arrived in a refugee camp in the Philippines before achieving asylum and migrating to the United States, settling in Hartford, Connecticut, alongside six relatives. His dad abandoned the family after this. Ocean was reunited with his paternal grandfather later in life. Ocean, who suspects dyslexia runs in his family, was the first in his family to learn to read, at the age of eleven. At 15 years old, he served on a tobacco farm illegally and would afterward describe his experiences on the farm in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Ocean Vuong Mother | Mom
His mother Rose was a Vietnamese immigrant who raised Ocean as a single mother working in a nail salon for 25 years. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer three months prior to the publication of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Following his mother’s death in 2019, Ocean started 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.”
Ocean Vuong Grandfather
His grandfather was a white American soldier who met and married his grandma during the Vietnam war. Ocean’s grandfather (his mother’s father) is an American who fought in Vietnam.
Ocean Vuong Father
He knows very little about his dad except that he ended up going to jail for criminal behavior.
Ocean Vuong Partner | Boyfriend | Peter Bienkowski
Ocean is openly gay. He resides in Northampton, Massachusetts with his partner Peter Bienkowski, a lawyer who is a Lithuanian-Polish Jew, whose grandmother, the prose poem Nothing in the new collection tells us, narrowly escaped Auschwitz. The two are all descendants of trauma.
Ocean Vuong Education
He joined Glastonbury High School in Glastonbury, Connecticut, a school known for academic excellence. While in high school, Ocean told fellow Glastonbury graduate Kat Chow he “understood he had to leave Connecticut.” Following spending some time at Manchester Community College, Ocean headed to Pace University in New York to study marketing. Ocean’s time there lasted only a few weeks prior to he understood it “wasn’t for him.” He later joined 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 his B.A. in English. He earned his M.F.A. in poetry from New York University.
Ocean Vuong Poetry
He is the author of the poetry collections Time Is a Mother (2022) and Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016), the winner of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the chapbooks No (2013) and Burnings (2010), which became an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association. Ocean’s novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), became longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, plus the PEN/Hemingway Debut novel award; the novel was also shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and received the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction.
Ocean’s work has been translated into Hindi, Korean, Russian, and Vietnamese. In 2014, Ocean was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He won a Whiting Award in 2016 and a MacArthur fellowship in 2019. Ocean is the former managing editor of Thrush Press and now lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where he is on faculty in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Ocean Vuong Books | Books By Ocean Vuong
– On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
– Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016)
– No (2013)
– Burnings (2010)
– Time Is a Mother (2022)
Ocean Vuong Quotes | On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Quotes
– “They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
– “I miss you more than I remember you.”
– “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”
– “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
– I miss you more than I remember you.”
– “When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
– “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
– “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”
– “Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.”
– “The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already.”
Ocean Vuong Quote
Time Is A Mother Ocean Vuong Quotes
– “I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.”
– “What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?”
– “They say the earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the music.”
– “How can we know, with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that survives?”
– “Because this body is my last address.”
– “Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.”
– “Oh no. The sadness is intensifying. How rude.”
– “none of us are children long enough to love it”
– “Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.”
Burnings Ocean Vuong
Ocean’s first chapbook, Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press), was a 2011 “Over The Rainbow” selection for famous books on non-heterosexuality by the American Library Association. Burnings explores refugee culture, be the speaker a literal refugee from a torn homeland, or a refugee from his own skin, burning with the heat of awakening eroticism.
Ocean Vuong Time Is A Mother | New Book
Following his mother’s death in 2019, Ocean began writing his second collection of poetry, Time is a Mother (2022), which has been regarded as a “search for life after the death of his mother.” In Time is a Mother, Ocean searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. His poems circle fragmented lives to find both restorations as well as the epicenter of the break.
Ocean Vuong Pronouns
In his life, before giving a reading, the organizer asked Ocean for his preferred pronouns. Ocean never knew he had a choice. “He/him” he said, after a pause, suddenly unsure. But Ocean felt a door had opened—if only slightly—and through it he had glimpsed a path he had not known existed.
Ocean Vuong Trevor | Trevor Real
In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Little Dog meets a young white man called Trevor while working on a tobacco farm one summer, and the pair begin a romantic relationship. Trevor finally becomes addicted to opioids and later overdoses and dies.
Ocean Vuong NYU
He is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at New York University.
Ocean Vuong Interview
On March 8, 2020, Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful writer Ocean in a joyful, crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. He spoke to the world they have come to inhabit— its heartbreak and its poetry, its possibilities for loss and for finding new life.
Ocean Vuong Novel | On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Is Trevor Real | Trevor
On June 4, 2019, Ocean released his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous published by Penguin Press. While working on the novel, the biggest issue Ocean had was with grammatical tense, since there are no past participles in Vietnamese. He also recognized 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 book is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read and is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
Ocean Vuong Mother Poem
In the Mother Poem, Ocean writes about his loving but abusive relationship with his mother, a Vietnamese immigrant haunted by her past. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer three months before the publication of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Ocean Vuong Gender
Ocean is a male. He explores both gender and sexuality in his autobiographical novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Ocean Vuong Poetry Collection | Night Sky With Exit Wounds
In 2016, Ocean released his collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds which won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2017. Ocean and his family came to the United States from Vietnam when he was two years old. Most of the poems in the collection take the Vietnam War as their subject, such as “Aubade With Burning City” which deals with the Fall of Saigon. “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown)”, named for a Mark Rothko painting, is about the 9/11 attacks and Ocean’s experience that day.
Ocean Vuong Short Story
At fourteen, Ocean takes a job picking tobacco on a farm outside Hartford, and starts a fraught relationship with a white boy named Trevor, the grandson of the farm’s owner.
Ocean Vuong Best Poems | Famous Poems | Poems
– Anaphora as Coping Mechanism
– Beautiful Short Loser
– Daily Bread
– Dear Rose
– Deto(nation)
Home Wrecker
– Immigrant Haibun
– Kissing in Vietnamese
– Lazarus
– Logophobia
– My Father Writes from Prison
– Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong
– Telemachus
– The Bull
– The Smallest Measure
– Torso of Air
– Trojan
Ocean Vuong Love Poem
In 2016, Ocean published his love poem Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong.
Ocean Vuong Short Poems
– Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong
– Scavengers
– On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
– “Prayer for the Newly Damned,”
– “Telemachus,”
– “Homewrecker,”
– “Eurydice,”
– “Prayer for the Newly Damned,”
– Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong
– Scavengers
– On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong Net Worth
Ocean gets his wealth from his work as an essayist, and novelist who is the winner of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize due to his poetry. Therefore, Ocean has accumulated a decent fortune over the years. Ocean’s net worth is $5 million.
How Old is Ocean Vuong
Ocean is a 35-year-old who was born on October 14, 1988, in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam. Ocean celebrates his birthday on October 14, every year.
Who Is Ocean Vuong
He is a poet, essayist, and novelist who is the author of The New York Times bestselling poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Press 2022), and The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press 2019), which has been translated into 37 languages. Ocean also works as a tenured Professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at NYU.
How Tall Is Ocean Vuong
Ocean is a man of below-average stature who stands at a height of 5 ft 6 in ( Approx. 1.65m ).
Ocean Vuong Social Media Account
Instagram – ocean_vuong