Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, novelist, and professor of creative writing at New York University. He is the author of the poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016), the epistolary novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), and Time Is a Mother (2022) . He is a MacArthur Fellowship recipient and a winner of major literary prizes.

"My mother taught me that you can look at something and people and scenarios endlessly and still find something new.

Just because you have seen it does not mean that you have known it"