ALLIANCE, Ohio – Award-winning poet, Ocean Vuong will present the Eckler Lecture at 7 p.m., on Wednesday, October 17 in the Brush Performance Hall of the Giese Center for the Performing Arts.

The lecture will feature Vuong’s reading of his works and discussion, including his book of poetry Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the forthcoming novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019), and the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which was a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whiting Award, and the Thom Gunn Award, and finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, Vuong has received honors from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, 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 Saigon, Vietnam, Vuong immigrated to the US at the age of two as a child refugee. He currently lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at UMass Amherst's MFA for Poets and Writers Program.

The Mary W. and Eric. A. Eckler Endowment in Literature and Drama was established in 1981 through an endowment given by Mr. John A. and Mrs. Dorothy (Nelson ’29) Cummins in appreciation of the many years of service to the community and Mount Union by the Ecklers. Dr. Eric A. and Mrs. Mary Eckler were long-time faculty members in the Department of Education at the institution.

For more information, contact the Office of Marketing at (330) 823-6063.