Ocean Vuong to Give Westminster School Reading Feb. 22

Award-winning writer Ocean Vuong will give a reading at Westminster School Feb. 22 as part of the school’s Friday Nights at Westminster series. The student reader will be senior Meg Cournoyer, the winner of this year’s This I Believe Essay Contest.

Vuong is the author of the debut novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” and 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.

Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Born in Vietnam, he serves as an assistant professor in the Master of Fine Arts program for poets and writers at UMass Amherst.

Vuong’s Westminster School reading is free and open to the public and will begin at 7 p.m. in the Gund Reading Room of the school’s Armour Academic Center. The school is located at 995 Hopmeadow St. in Simsbury. Ample parking will be available in the parking lot adjacent to Armour Academic Center.

The event is made possible by generous grants from the Ford-Goldfarb English Department Enrichment Fund and the Marina Rust Connor Fund.