Ocean Vuong and Tommy Orange
This week, we\u2019ll hear a conversation between two writers with unique perspectives on America.\xa0 Ocean Vuong is a poet and the author of the novel On Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous.\xa0 The story closely mirrors Vuong\u2019s 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. \xa0\xa0Tommy Orange published his debut novel, There There, in 2018; it\u2019s about the complex and painful history of a multi-generational Native American family in Oakland.\xa0 On February 3, 2020, Ocean Vuong and Tommy Orange came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.\xa0 It was a powerful evening \u2013 a few times you could hear members of the audience gasp as conversation literally took their breath away.\xa0 It was City Arts & Lectures\u2019 last live event before the COVID-19 pandemic kept us from gathering \u2013 of course we didn\u2019t know that at the time, but we\u2019ve returned to this conversation for inspiration many times since then.