CONTENTS Introduction: 0:42-6:35 Rickey Laurentiis: Poetry Reading 6:44-41:34 Ocean Vuong: Poetry Reading 41:47-1:02:00 Rickey and Ocean in Conversation: 1:02:13-1:23: 13 Originally recorded November 15, 2018 at Stonehill College ABOUT OCEAN VUONG Ocean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. 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. Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon and Justin Trudeau, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, VICE, The Fantastic Man, and The New Yorker. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst. He is currently not writing anything. For more information about Ocean Vuong and his writing go to: https://www.oceanvuong.com/ ABOUT RICKEY LAURENTIIS Rickey Laurentiis (b. 1989, February 7) was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark. His poetry has been supported by several foundations and fellowships, including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017), Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy (2014), Poetry International Rotterdam (2014), the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), Cave Canem Foundation (2009-2011), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded him a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, he traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. He received his MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where he was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow, and his Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where he read literature and queer theory. He is the author of Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. Boy with Thorn was also named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry books by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions. Individual poems have appeared widely, including Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry; have been anthologized in Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers Speak of Palestine, Bettering American Poetry, A Tale of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and Prospect.3‘s art catalogue Notes for Now; as well as translated into Arabic, Spanish and Ukrainian. Laurentiis’ interests include visual culture, ekphrasis, chiaroscuro and shade, revisionary logics, penetration and the body, radical justice, cultural studies, and shame. He has taught at a selection of institutions, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the 92nd Street Y. He is the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poeticsat the University of Pittsburgh, and serves on the executive board for the Black Art Futures Fund. For more information about Rickey Laurentiis and his writing go to: https://www.rickeylaurentiis.com/#1
