Ocean Vuong, is a Vietnamese-American poet, essayist, and novelist, whose haunting and abstract style of poetry has brought him numerous awards, including a 2019 MacArthur Genius Grant, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Whiting Award. Vuong is the author of the poetry collection, Time is a Mother (2022); The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019); and the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). Vuong was born in Saigon in 1988 and raised in Hartford, CT. He is a professor in the MFA program at New York University.