Andrei Codrescu. I was born in Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania, where in the 16th century they burned witches, in 1989 they shot students. In the teens of the 21st century the citizens didn’t flinch when Europe’s second biggest theatre festival set off fireworks at midnight. I emigrated to Detroit in 1966 where a revolution was in progress. Tanks of the 82nd airborne and National Guard rolled down Woodward Avenue and shot at anyone out after the 6pm curfew. I moved to New York City in 1966, where I met poets. My first poetry in English, License to Carry a Gun, was published in 1970. I lived in San Francisco and in the Northern California town of Monte Rio. In 1983 I founded Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas (1983-2016). I taught literature and poetry at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University. In 1983 (anno mirabilis), I wrote weekly for The Baltimore Sun and the City Paper, and started commmenting regularly on NPR (National Public Radio.) In 1989, I returned to Romania to cover the fall of the Ceausescu regime for NPR and ABC News, and wrote The Hole in the Flag: an Exile's Story of Return and Revolution. After this return, I reconnected with the Romanian language, and have gone back every two years. The result is a body of work in Romanian. English is still my primary language, but I think that being bilingual is beneficial. My most recent books are:

• A Possible Epic of Care: a Collaboration with Vincent Katz (Black Widow Press, 2023)

• Too Late for Nightmares (Black Widow Press, 2022)

• Visul Diacritic (Editura Nemira, 2021) poetry in Romanian

• No Time Like Now (Pitt Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

• The Collected Japanese Ghost Stories of Lafcadio Hearn, which I introduced and edited (Princeton University Press, 2019

• The Art of Forgetting: New Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2016)

• Bibliodeath: My Archives (with Life in Footnotes) (Antibookclub, 2012)

• So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2012)

• Whatever Gets You Through the Night: a Story of Sheherezade and The Arabian Entertainments (Princeton University Press, 2011)

• The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, (Princeton University Press, 2009)

• The Poetry Lesson (Princeton University Press, 2010)

My correspondence, notebooks and sundry documents are at the LSU Hill Memorial Library, the University of Illinois/ Champaign-Urbana’s Slavic Library, the New Orleans Historical Society, Muzeul Cărtii si Exilului Românesc in Craiova, Romania, the University of Iowa’s collection of Twentieth-Century Avantgarde Art, and the Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu.

Grab any dozen adjectives, and they’ll probably describe Andrei Codrescu: dazzling, funny, generous, warm, principled, loyal, dangerous, flaneur, Mr Present… It’s amazing how little ennui he’s capable of. I love Andrei and have since we met some 40 years ago. I’ve probably had more sheer fun with him than almost anyone I know. Nobody can make anything into an adventure the way he can: strolling on an Upper West Side street, he’ll find a discarded book by Patrick Leigh Fermor, your new favorite author. He’s always there when something is happening and he knows what it is. There’s no one he hasn’t read, seemingly, in all of world literature, and in the original language. Andrei, how many languages do you speak? I know there’s Romanian, Italian, French, English, but he contains more multitudes than a dozen Whitmans. Part of his brilliance is to make you brilliant–you’re wittier, smarter, more insightful by listening to him be witty, smart, and insightful. What a great trick! We wrote a million collaborations on napkins in bars in New York and in New Orleans and threw them in the air like Li Po confetti; our love is pure. Look him up if you want to see all his titles, awards, and credentials, but better: hear him read when you get the chance – Elinor Nauen