The New Yorker Interview:

The author of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” and the new poetry collection “Time Is a Mother” has won a MacArthur “genius” grant, yet keeps his white-belt approach to writing.

By Hua Hsu 

Ocean Vuong was two when he immigrated with his family to the United States from Vietnam. They settled in Hartford, Connecticut, with seven relatives sharing a one-bedroom apartment. At the time, their lives were defined by survival. His father left one day and never came back. His mother worked long hours at a nail salon. Vuong was the first member of the family to learn to read and write proficiently. He was eleven.

As a teen-ager, witness to the opioid abuse and casual hopelessness common in post-industrial New England, Vuong realized that he needed to leave Connecticut. He attended Pace University, in Manhattan, where he planned to study business. But he quickly discovered that this was not for him. He enrolled at Brooklyn College. “I just thought if I could get a degree, I could tell my mother it was bioscience or whatever,” he says. “I just wanted to get the cap and gown.” At Brooklyn College, he studied literature and began taking writing courses. “Once in a while, you get a student who’s not testing to be a writer, but who is already one,” the novelist and poet Ben Lerner, who taught Vuong at Brooklyn College, has said.

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