Poet, novelist, professor Ocean Vuong to give Spencer Lecture

LAWRENCE — The Commons will host the Fall 2024 Kenneth Spencer Lecture, which will feature a conversation between Ocean Vuong and Chloé Cooper Jones on Sept. 26. The event will take place at 7 p.m. at Liberty Hall in downtown Lawrence.

Ocean Vuong

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 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker and The New York Times. 

Born in Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, Vuong was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study international marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 19th century American literature. He subsequently received his MFA in poetry from New York University.

Chloé Cooper Jones

Jones is a professor, journalist and the author of the memoir "Easy Beauty," which was named a best book of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2020. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, a Howard Foundation Fellow and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Jones grew up in Tonganoxie and received an MFA and a doctorate from KU.

About the lecture

The Kenneth A. Spencer Lecture, hosted annually by The Commons, is an endowed lecture dedicated to bringing leading thinkers across disciplines and ways of knowing to address the KU and regional communities. In recent years, the lecture series has featured writer/historian Rebecca Solnit, poet/scholar/artist Eve L. Ewing, activist/writer Jose Antonio Vargas, author/illustrator/screenwriter Jonny Sun, writer/scientist/enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, poet/essayist Ross Gay and forager/public lands advocate Alexis Nikole Nelson.

Visit the ticket website for the event for free tickets. Books by both writers will be available for sale by the Raven Book Store.

Anyone needing special accommodations may contact The Commons staff for assistance at thecommons@ku.edu.