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Award-winning poet Ocean Vuong’s debut full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has been hailed by critics for its powerful emotional undertow, sincerity and candor, and “sense of the evanescence of all earthly things” as Michiko Kakutani writes in The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and now a resident of New York City, Vuong’s poems navigate the overarching worlds of history, sexuality, and humanity with startling precision. Reflecting on how geographical and linguistic energies intersect and what it means to write as a Vietnamese refugee in the contemporary space, Vuong reads from and discusses his poetry with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose writing also often explores the Vietnamese American experience.
Poet and essayist Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, he has received many honors including fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean has been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, VICE, and The New Yorker. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in New York City.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative, and the Chicago Tribune and he is the author of the academic book Race and Resistance. His first novel, The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His newest nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was be published in April 2016. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
