But on that fateful first day
of class, he received a call
from Michael Wiegers at
Copper Canyon Press, let-
ting him know the press had
accepted his book for publi-
cation. “What people don’t
understand,” Vuong says, “is
that I had been working on
Night Sky With Exit Wounds
for eight years. And one of
the reasons I sent my manu-
script to that press was that
they promised a personal
rejection, and since I wasn’t
enrolled in school yet, I was
craving feedback.”
For Wiegers there was no
doubt the manuscript needed
to be in the world. “I was
struck by his ability to risk
toeing the edge of sentimen-
tality, without crossing over
it,” he says. “His poems were
open and vulnerable and
bold enough to take on the big topics
of love and grief and war and familial
legacy. These were gentle poems that
were graceful and confident—and did
not need to perform themselves toward
the deep desire they contained.”
The prospect of publication would
give Vuong something tangible to show
his mother. “Since my mother could not
read, I insisted that the book have my
picture so that she could see it was re-
ally me and show all of her customers at
the nail salon,” Vuong says. A few days
later, Don Share from the Poetry Foun-
dation called to offer him the $25,800
Ruth Lilly Prize. The timing was per-
fect for Vuong, who could now proceed
with confidence, fine-tuning his book
for the next two years without dealing
with financial stress or the anxieties of
an uncertain future. Two years later,
Night Sky With Exit Wounds was pub-
lished to considerable fanfare.
Besides giving his mother a book and,
after years of financial hardship, a down
payment for a house, Vuong also had
the opportunity to show her a bit of the
literary world he had just entered: “She
has come to a few of my readings, and
she sits in the room so that she can look
at the audience responding to my work.
She calls me a scholar, not a poet, be-
cause in Vietnam, scholars are revered.”
What did he get for himself after that
flurry of fellowships? “My only splurge
was a coat,” he says.
Vuong, who now lives in Northamp-
ton, Massachusetts, credits his Bud-
dhist upbringing with his ability to
navigate all the attention in stride. He
meditates five times a week and keeps
reminding himself of the person he was
when he first fell in love with writing.
“I bring him to the present,” Vuong
explains, “not the person who won the
awards—he has nothing to teach me.
So when people ask what is the secret
of my success, I say Submittable.”
He has maintained this sober-
ing stance as he steps into the role of
teacher and mentor at his new job as as-
sistant professor of English at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts in Amherst.
“I tell my students that I didn’t have a
social life. I had a library card,” he says.
“I sit down with them and ask them to
privilege intention over motivation.”
But he admits it’s a challenge to keepstudents focused on the art of writing
during the era of social media, which
he believes fuels competitiveness.
“My interactions with Saeed and
Eduardo and Rickey Laurentiis were
important, but afterward I went
home to the page, not to Facebook or
Twitter,” he says. Nevertheless, he is
determined to give his students the
kind of positive experience he had with
his own teachers like Ben Lerner, Yusef
Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds.
What also keeps him centered is the
reality of his family’s urgencies. “They
still need my support,” he says, par-
ticularly now as the current adminis-
tration implements a policy to revoke
residency from Vietnamese refugees
deemed “violent-crime aliens.” Vuong
says, “Those are my people! We come
from a troubled history, and with such
trauma come problems. It’s unfair to
penalize a community for an afflic-
tion exacerbated by this country’s
participation in the Vietnam conflict.”
While he waits to find out how these
policies will directly affect his family,
Vuong turns to his first love, poetry,
for solace. In May 2018 he partneredprofile OCEAN VUONGJULY AUGUST 2019 34Ocean Vuong and his partner, Peter Bienkowski, along with their dog, Tofu.