Artist-in-Residence Welcome Event: Ocean Vuong

UPDATE: This event will now take place in the NYU Kimmel Center for University Life (60 Washington Square South), Eisner & Lubin Auditorium. This event has reached full capacity, and we are no longer accepting RSVPs. Should additional tickets become available due to cancellations, they will be released automatically via the Eventbrite form above. Please note that we do not maintain waitlists for our programs. Ocean Vuong is also reading at NYU on October 17, 2019.

“What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?…What is a country but a life sentence?” asks Little Dog, the narrator of Ocean Vuong’s highly anticipated, critically acclaimed debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019). The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU is honored to welcome award-winning writer and poet Vuong as its 2019-20 Artist-in-Residence. Vuong will read from his breathtaking novel⁠—a letter from a son to his mother that reveals the intergenerational impact and ongoing haunting of war, violence, and forced displacement. He is joined in conversation by friends and special guests Mahogany L. Browne (Black Girl Magic), Alexander Chee (How to Write an Autobiographical Novel), Monica Sok (A Nail the Evening Hangs On), and NYU Gallatin professor Sinan Antoon (The Book of Collateral Damage).

Registration is required, and limited to one per person.

This venue is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. A single-stall all-gender restroom is located on the first floor. If you need any accommodations, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019), forthcoming in sixteen languages worldwide. His critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), was a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, and winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Whiting Award, Thom Gunn Award, and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, Academy of American Poets, and Pushcart Prize.

Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 Leading Global Thinker, Vuong 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, VICE, The Fantastic Man, and The New Yorker.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Vuong lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he is an assistant professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Photo by Peter Bienkowski.