Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds , winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic , Harper's , The Nation , New Republic , The New Yorker , and The New York Times. In 2019 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor of English at UMass-Amherst. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.