An Evening with Ocean Vuong in conversation with Kei Miller

🎟️ Please note: Tickets are REQUIRED. Ticket options include:

1 Guest + 1 Book: Each ticket admits one (1) guest into the venue and includes one (1) copy of The Emperor of Gladness ($25). Books will be handed out upon entry.

1 Guest + No Book: Each ticket ($10) admits one (1) guest into the venue, book not included. Additional books will be available for sale at the event.

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One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City. The Emperor of Gladness is his latest novel.

Kei Miller is the author of 11 books that range across genres – fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He is interested both in that movement between genres and between creative writing and literary scholarship. In 2014 he won the Forward Prize for Poetry for The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way To Zion. His Novel Augustown won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His collection of essays, Things I Have Withheld was shortlisted for the Bailley Gifford Prize. He has also written several essays of literary scholarship in the field of Caribbean Literature.
Kei joined the English Faculty at UM in 2021. He previously taught in the UK at the Universities of Exeter, London, and Glasgow. Kei has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. His dissertation examined the epistolary tradition in West Indian Literature.

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