Join TMA for a conversation with Vietnamese American writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong, and professor Joey S. Kim. They will discuss themes of Asian and Asian American embodiment, visuality, labor, leisure, and loss, as well as Vuong’s relationship to writing and photography. This event is a collaboration between the Toledo Museum of Art and the University of Toledo and is being held in conjunction with the museum debut of Vuong’s photography at TMA in From Asia to the World.

Vuong’s books On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Time Is a Mother, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds can be purchased online or in person at the TMA Store. 

This program has been made possible with support from the University of Toledo Department of English Language and Literature.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner of an American Book Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. The novel spent six weeks on the New York Times best seller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, in a working-class family of nail salon and factory laborers, Vuong was educated at Manchester Community College and Pace University before enrolling at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in nineteenth-century American literature. He received his MFA in poetry from New York University. He currently divides his time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York City, where he is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at NYU. 

Dr. Joey S. Kim is assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo. Prior to arriving in Toledo, Dr. Kim was a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University’s Kilachand Honors College and held teaching positions at The Ohio State University and the University of Texas at Austin. She researches global Anglophone literature with a focus on nineteenth-century poetics, global Asian cultures, Asian American literature, and critical race and ethnic studies. Recently recognized as a 20 Under 40 Toledo awardee, she is active in the community, working with the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo, the Fair Housing Center, the Toledo Lucas County Public Library, and local news outlets to amplify literature, the arts, and Asian American representation in the region.

This event will be recorded and shared from the TMA website 72 hours after the event.