Join us for a poetry reading exploring diaspora, featuring Ocean Vuong and Nate Marshall. In his impressive, acclaimed debut collection, Ocean Vuong writes beauty into and culls from individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes, such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vuong is an undergraduate English major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, and the Connecticut Poetry Society's Al Savard Award, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. His work has appeared in SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK, among others. Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is the author of Wild Hundreds and an editor of the BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Wild Hundreds has been honored with the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s award for Poetry Book of the Year and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His last rap album, Grown came out in 2015 with his group Daily Lyrical Product. He is the national program director of Louder Than A Bomb Youth Poetry Festival and a visiting assistant professor at Wabash College.
