Photo of Ocean Vuong

Ten Evenings

Ocean Vuong

BUY VIRTUAL PASS

“They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”

OCEAN VUONG, ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS

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.

“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.”

RON CHARLES, THE WASHINGTON POST

Books

Copies of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous with signed bookplates are available for sale from White Whale Bookstore.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous book cover

WHEN

Monday, March 22, 2021
Virtual Event, watch anytime online for one week
BUY VIRTUAL PASS
Video links will be emailed to all ticket holders on the day of the scheduled lecture. Closed captioning will be available.
Community access tickets are available if cost is a barrier to view this lecture. If you’d like to request a community access ticket please email us at info@pittsburghlectures.org.

ASK A QUESTION

Please submit your question for the author two weeks in advance.

SUBMIT A QUESTION
READ THE PROGRAM BOOK

WHERE

Online

SHARE THIS EVENT

Upcoming Lectures

Hernan Diaz

APR 8

Ed Yong

APR 29

Jesmyn Ward

MAY 13

Anna Monardo

MAY 23