About the featured speakers:
Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Press 2022), and The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press 2019), which has been translated into 37 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, 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.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out of Business school and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.
He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and serves as a tenured Professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at NYU.
Moderators:
Dr. Carlos Ulises Decena is the Acting Director, and Cross-Campus Director of Undergraduate Intellectual Life at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, and Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
Decena joined the Departments of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2005. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of immigration and queer studies, and his research explores the meeting points of Black, ethnic, and area studies. A native of the Dominican Republic, Decena holds a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University. Decena is the author of two books: Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men (2011) and Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean (2023), both published by Duke University Press.
Dr. Allan Punzalan Isaac is Professor of American Studies and English and Associate Humanities Dean at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
He specializes in Asian American and comparative race studies and examines issues around migration, postcoloniality, gender and sexuality, and the Philippines and its diaspora. His first book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award. His second book is entitled, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor.
He has taught at DeLaSalle University-Taft in Manila, Philippines as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. His current research focuses on death and dying in the Filipino diaspora.