“Part of [Andrei’s] brilliance is to make you brilliant–you’re wittier, smarter, more insightful by listening to him be witty, smart, and insightful.” —Elinor Nauen
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He is the winner of the Ovid Prize for poetry as well as the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar.
Born in Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania, Andrei emigrated to Detroit in 1966 where a revolution was in progress. He moved to New York City, and his first collection of poetry in English, License to Carry a Gun, was published in 1970. Moving again, he later lived in San Francisco, the Northern California town of Monte Rio, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year, and actively participating in literary life by writing poetry, stories, essays, and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, and The Paris Review.
Andrei founded Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books and Ideas (1983-2016) and was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. He taught literature and poetry at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University. Eventually returning to Romania to cover the fall of the Ceausescu regime for NPRA and ABC News, Andrei wrote The Hole in the Flag: an Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution, and reconnected with the Romanian language. He goes back every two years.
Andrei won the Peabody Award for the documentary Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century, an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and he is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. The New York Times has called him “one of our most magical writers.”
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