Poet and essayist Ocean Vuong is the author of the best-selling, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and Thom Gunn Award and named by the New York Times as a Top 10 Book of 2016. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his other honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and a Pushcart Prize. Vuong's 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, he now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst. He is currently at work on his first novel.

David Gates is an American journalist and novelist. His first novel, Jernigan (1991) about a dysfunctional one-parent family, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates has published short stories in The New Yorker, Tin House, Newsweek, The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, and The Paris Review. Gates is also a Guggenheim Fellow. Until 2008, he was a senior writer and editor in the Arts section at Newsweek magazine, specializing in articles on books and music. He teaches in the graduate writing program at The University of Montana, as well as at the Bennington Writing Seminars
UMMA is pleased to be the site for the Zell Visiting Writers Series, which brings outstanding writers each semester. The Series is made possible through a generous gift from U-M alumna Helen Zell (AB ’64, LLDHon ’13).