Ocean Vuong is an award-winning poet and the author of the critically acclaimed bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a brilliant, heartbreaking family portrait – a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling.

Framed as a letter from a son to his mother who cannot read, this shattering portrait of a Vietnamese family and first love, asks how to survive, how to find joy in darkness, and the meaning of American identity. With stunning urgency and grace, Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are.

Vuong erupted onto the literary scene with his first poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, for which he became only the second debut poet to win the T. S. Eliot Prize. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards and longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award. In 2019, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the youngest recipient of the grant in that year’s class.