Poets & Writers Theater

In this event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Ocean Vuong talks about his journey through poetry and teaching, how his voice and understanding of genre have changed, and whether or not poetry can change the world in a conversation with Cathy Park Hong. “I’ve always been doubtful of myself, of my work, of my life. But when I’m writing, when I’m inside the poem, I rarely feel true fear,” says Vuong.

In this recorded event, Terrance Hayes, Claudia Rankine, and Ocean Vuong, acclaimed authors and professors at New York University’s Creative Writing Program, read from their work and participate in a conversation together for a packed audience at NYU Skirball. Rankine is the recipient of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize.

Watch TIME Magazine’s compilation of their one hundred must-read books of 2022, which includes books by Nuar Alsadir, Franny Choi, Isaac Fitzgerald, CJ Hauser, Jay Hopler, Oscar Hokeah, Yiyun Li, Sarah Thankam Matthews, and Ocean Vuong. 

“When I write, I feel much larger than the limits of my body,” says Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022), in this interview with his Danish translator Caspar Eric at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. “There is a mystery you tap into that is much bigger.”

“What do you want, I asked, forgetting I had / no language,” reads Ocean Vuong from his poem “The Bull,” which appears in his second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022), in this WSJ. Magazine video directed by Gioncarlo Valentine.

“I would sneak out of recess, stay in the library to listen to tapes of famous speeches, and one of them was Martin Luther King,” recounts Ocean Vuong about his childhood in this interview with Michel Martin for Amanpour and Company. “You could hear the static when he was giving the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and I thought...who is this man talking about dreams in a snowstorm?” Vuong was awarded the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Fiction & Poetry Prize for his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019).

On BRIC TV’s 112BK, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, co-owner of Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, presents her summer reading recommendations including Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019), Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift Hogarth, 2019), Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black (Knopf, 2018), and Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer (St. Martin’s Press, 2019).

In this PBS NewsHour video, NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada highlight their favorite books for summer reading, which include Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019), Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question (Pantheon, 2019), and José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2018).

“It was an attempt to see if language can really be a bridge, as it is often aspired to be, and ultimately that it could fail.” In this video, Ocean Vuong speaks about the letter he wrote to his illiterate mother that inspired his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019). A profile of Vuong by Rigoberto González appears in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The Kindergarten Teacher stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as an aspiring poet and elementary school teacher who discovers the talents of a five-year-old boy in her class and becomes obsessed with protecting and encouraging his writing. Gyllenhaal and director Sara Colangelo commissioned poetry from Kaveh Akbar, Dominique Townsend, and Ocean Vuong to include as verses written by the two characters.

“I think I expect to suffer here, and my goal then is to suffer well or suffer skillfully.” In this conversation with Dawn Lanuza for the Fully Booked Chats series, Ocean Vuong discusses the differences between writing poems and novels, the question of whether literature can heal, and the story behind his name Ocean.

“When a loved one dies, you experience your life in just two days, today, when they are no longer here, and yesterday, the immense, vast yesterday, when they were here,” says Ocean Vuong, author most recently of Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022), in this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” arts and culture video series.

“Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.” Ocean Vuong reads “Notebook Fragments” for Button Poetry at the 2016 AWP conference and book fair. Vuong, author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), is featured in “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

"Outside, a soldier spits out / his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones / fallen from the sky. May / all your Christmases be white / as the traffic guard unstraps his holster." Ocean Vuong shares poems from his debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), and speaks about the oral tradition of his family and his personal ties to the Vietnam War for a series on PBS NewsHour.