Day 20: Ocean Vuong reads his poem "The Last Dinosaur.” This poem first appeared in a slightly different form in The Boston Review (2021) and in his collection Time is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022).

Writer, professor, and photographer, Ocean Vuong is the author of The Emperor of Gladness. Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.

Text of today’s poem and more details about our program can be found at: deerfieldlibrary.org/queerpoemaday/

Find books from participating poets in our library's catalog. 

Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language. 

Queer Poem-a-Day is founded and co-directed by poet and professor Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Library and host of the Deerfield Public Library Podcast. Music for this fifth year of our series is “L’Ange Verrier” from Le Rossignol Éperdu by Reynaldo Hahn, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission.