Krista interviewed the writer Ocean Vuong on March 8 in a joyful room full of podcast makers at On Air Fest in Brooklyn. None of us would have guessed that within a handful of days such an event would become unimaginable. So this conversation holds a last memory before the world shifted on its axis. More stunning is how exquisitely Ocean Vuong spoke on that day to the world we have now entered — its heartbreak, its poetry, and its possibilities of both destroying and saving.

Ocean Vuong is an assistant professor of English in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award; and a novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. He was a 2019 MacArthur Fellow

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath." Find more at onbeing.org.