Immediately following his conversation in TMA’s Great Gallery, meet Ocean Vuong, author of the New York Times best-selling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A nominee for the National Book Award and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he is also the author of the poetry collections Time Is a Mother, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book and winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Thom Gunn Award.

Vuong will be signing books including On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Time Is a Mother, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which can all be purchased at the TMA store.  

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.