Poet Ocean Vuong will read on Monday, February 20, 2017, on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus as part of the Writers in the Library reading series. The mission of Writers in the Library is to “showcase the work of novelists, poets, and other literary craftsmen.” Some of the best voices on the literary scene today are invited to read.

The reading at 7 p.m. in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of the John C. Hodges Library is free and open to the public; all are encouraged to attend.

Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). A 2016 Whiting Award winner and Ruth Lilly fellow, he has received honors from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, Narrative magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His writings have been featured in the Kenyon Review, GRANTA, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in New York City.

Of Vuong’s work, The New Yorker said, “Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. . . . His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.” 

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Writers in the Library is sponsored by the UT Libraries and the Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For more information contact Erin Elizabeth Smith, Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the UT Libraries, at esmith83@utk.edu.

Visit http://library.utk.edu/writers for a complete schedule of Writers in the Library readings for the 2016-2017 academic year.

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