Name: Ocean Vuong in Conversation
Start: 2025-10-23T19:30:00-05:00
End: 2025-10-23T21:00:00-05:00
Location: Coffman Memorial Union

The Esther Freier Lectures in Literature Series presents Ocean Vuong at the Great Hall in Coffman Union. Writer, professor, and photographer, Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, Mark Twain Award, and New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages.
This in-person event is free and open to the public with registration at z.umn.edu/Ocean25
Live captioning and ASL provided. For further questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email [email protected] or call 612-626-1528. Presented by the Department of English.
Vuong's latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is an instant New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club Pick. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, Vuong is also the author of the poetry collections Time Is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin Prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Whiting Award, and Thom Gunn Award. 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.
Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its 100 Leading Global Thinkers, Vuong's writings have been featured in the Atlantic, Nation, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Village Voice, Granta, Harpers, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.
He currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York City, where he serves as Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.