Ocean Vuong on Writing the Aftermath

Photo: Bjarne x Takata

“I walked through this cornfield and I thought, ‘I need to change my life.’

You see the plants all over your head and you think ‘I can be at any place in time. I don’t know if I belong to myself.’ And I think that derangement of the senses is what Rimbeaud kept talking about. I didn’t feel it with absinthe, but I felt it with corn. And I think that was the moment where I said, ‘I don’t know how, but I’m going to figure it out.’ I didn’t know what art was, I didn’t know what poetry was, but I knew that I had to find a way to hide from the life I was given and enter a different world, a different cornfield.”

Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019). A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst.