[5] Ocean Vuong was born in Hồ Chí Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), Vietnam[6] to a multiracial mother.

Fearing for their safety, his grandmother made the difficult decision to place his mother and her sisters in separate orphanages.

At 18, she had given birth to Ocean and was working in a Saigon salon, washing men’s hair to make ends meet.

[7] However, her mixed-race heritage caught the attention of a policeman, who recognized that, under Vietnamese law, she was working illegally due to her background.

The family was evacuated to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where they waited as the Salvation Army processed their resettlement claim.

"[12] He then enrolled at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he studied 19th-century English literature under poet and novelist Ben Lerner, and earned his B.A.

[15] Vuong's poems and essays have been published in various journals, including Poetry,[16] The Nation,[17] TriQuarterly,[18] Guernica,[19] The Rumpus,[20] Boston Review,[21] Narrative Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

[22] His first chapbook, Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press), was a 2011 "Over The Rainbow" selection for notable books with LGBT content by the American Library Association.

Discussing his contribution to the project, Vuong opined that, "So much of publishing is about seeing your name in the world, but this is the opposite, putting the future ghost of you forward.

"[30] He served as the 2019-2020 Artist-In-Resident at NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute, also working with the school's Center for Refugee Poetics and the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.

[31][32] In 2022, he became a tenured Professor of Creative Writing at NYU,[33] and has also taught in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

[10] Three months before the novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was published, Vuong's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she died in November 2019.

[38][39] In November 2021, an excerpt from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was featured in that year's New South Wales Higher School Certificate exams.

The paper, the first of two English exams taken by year twelve students in the Australian state, required examinees to read an excerpt from the novel and answer a short question responding to it.

On the exam's conclusion, Australian school students bombarded Vuong with confused inquiries via Instagram, to which the author responded in humorous fashion.