This poem is included in the digital library as part of a partnership between the OHSU Library and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative to share Narrative Medicine curriculum and the items used in those teaching sessions. For additional information about how the poem is used in teaching and a community driven context, please visit Accessible Narrative Medicine website.

Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon, Vietnam and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut in a working-class family. He attended Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to pursue an international marketing degree. He then dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, eventually earning a BA in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. He later earned his MFA in Poetry from NYU. He is presently a tenured professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at NYU and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. (Source: oceanvuong.com).