Ocean Vuong, internationally acclaimed author and NYU Creative Writing Program Professor, reads from his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness. Reading followed by a conversation with NYU Creative Writing Program Director Deborah Landau. The event will conclude with a signing/reception in the Skirball lower lobby, with books for sale courtesy of McNally Jackson.

Writer, professor, and photographer, Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he is also the author of the poetry collections, Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its 100 Leading Global Thinkers, Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. His newest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, was published in May 2025 by Penguin Press.

Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons, which was named one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2023.” Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included on “Best of ″ lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017.  UK editions of her books include Soft Targets (Bloodaxe, 2020) and Skeletons (Corsair, 2024). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic,  New York Review of Books, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Yale Review, and The New York Times, and included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English. Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She is a Professor at NYU, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.