Do we like Ocean Vuong?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean harm record and a decent public one, held back from the top only because the record of good deeds off the page is thin.
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet and novelist who grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, raised by his grandmother, mother and aunt, all refugees, in poverty. He was the first in his family to go to college and started out reading at open mics in New York. That upbringing is the engine of everything he writes.
The big break was the 2019 debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and the same year he won a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant. He is an openly queer writer, and he has said he doesn't like being confined to any genre or label because of the precarious nature of his own history.
His second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (2025), grew out of his mother's death and his own fast-food jobs in small-town Connecticut. Reviews were split. A Substack polemic gathered some sharp ones, including the Financial Times calling it clumsy, though it also notes plenty of positive reviews. That's a fight about prose, not about character.
Harm check: nothing nasty turned up. He signed the October 2024 pledge by over a thousand authors to refuse work with Israeli cultural institutions they call complicit. Where you land depends on whether you read it as solidarity with Palestinians or as a blunt boycott tool. In 2020 he was also among the signatories of a letter calling for the Poetry Foundation's president to resign over its response to racial justice protests, and the president and board chair later stepped down.
The recent news is gentler: he has turned to photography, and a first solo show opened in Hartford in August. He says the world has to come first and the photographer second, and that he feels a lot of doubt in his work. It's refreshing from a celebrated writer.
The good stuff is mostly in the work and the way he uses his name. He has backed colleagues' calls for accountability, and a Brooklyn College profile of him, from search results, says he mentors students. Honestly, the record of kindness off the page is thinner than the record on it, which is why this isn't a 10.