American · b. 1988
Ocean Vuong is a poet who wrote a novel like a poem. "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" (2019) takes the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother—a meditation on family, violence, queerness, and survival. Vuong was born in Saigon and raised in Hartford; his poetry collection "Night Sky with Exit Wounds" won the T.S. Eliot Prize. His sentences are dense with image; his autobiography is inseparable from his art.