Ocean Vuong and Tommy Orange

City Arts & Lectures

This week, we’ll hear a conversation between two writers with unique perspectives on America. Ocean Vuong is a poet and the author of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The story closely mirrors Vuong’s own life: born in Viet Nam, he was two years old when his family left a refugee camp in the Philippines to come to the US. Tommy Orange published his debut novel, There There, in 2018; it’s about the complex and painful history of a multi-generational Native American family in Oakland. On February 3, 2020, Ocean Vuong and Tommy Orange came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco. It was a powerful evening – a few times you could hear members of the audience gasp as conversation literally took their breath away. It was City Arts & Lectures’ last live event before the COVID-19 pandemic kept us from gathering – of course we didn’t know that at the time, but we’ve returned to this conversation for inspiration many times since then.