Events & exhibitions
event • Lectures

Reading and Conversation with Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong portrait
Ocean Vuong. Photo by Peter Bienkowski

Ocean Vuong will be joined in conversation with Ju Yon Kim, professor of English, Harvard University, and introduced by Catherine Ho ’21, AB candidate in neuroscience with a secondary in ethnicity, migration, rights, Harvard College.

The program will begin with an introduction by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. It will conclude with remarks from Durba Mitra RI ’19, assistant professor of studies of women, gender, and sexuality in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and cochair of the program organizing committee.

This event will be followed by the panel, "Gender Rights in the Time of Pandemic" on April 9, which will consider what it means to organize for gender rights in global contexts in the 21st century during a pandemic.

Radcliffe gratefully acknowledges the Perrin Moorhead Grayson and Bruns Grayson Dean’s Leadership Fund for Academic Ventures, which is supporting this event.

Speaker

Ocean Vuong is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019), forthcoming in 30 languages. A 2019 MacArthur Fellow and 2014 Pushcart Prize recipient, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), which was among the New York Times critics’ top books of 2016 and a winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. His honors include fellowships or grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation.

Vuong’s writings have been featured in the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize; the AtlanticGrantaHarper’s Magazine; the Nation; the New Republic; the New York Times; the New Yorker; the Paris Review; and the Village Voice. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2016, Vuong was also named by BuzzFeed to its list of 32 essential Asian American writers and has been profiled on NPR’s All Things Considered, Interview, the New YorkerPBS NewsHour, Poets & Writers, and Teen Vogue.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an associate professor in the MFA for Poets and Writers program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Event Video

Ocean Vuong portrait

More Events & Exhibitions

01 / 08