Andrei Codrescu

Andrei Codrescu
Codrescu in 2009
Born	(1946-12-20) December 20, 1946 (age 70) Romania
Occupation	Novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, screenwriter, commentator
Genre	Poetry, screenwriting, journalism, fiction, non-fiction

Andrei Codrescu (born December 20, 1946) is a Romanian-American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was the Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.

Born Andrei Perlmutter, he published his first poems in Romanian under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he and his mother, a photographer and printer, were able to leave Romania after Israel paid 2,000 USD (or 10,000 USD, according to other sources) for each to the Romanian communist regime. After some time in Italy, they moved to the United States in 1966, and settled in Detroit, where he became a regular at John Sinclair’s Artists and Writers’ Workshop. A year later, he moved to New York, where he became part of the literary scene on the Lower East Side. There he met Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, and published his first poems in English.

In 1970, his poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the "Big Table Award". He moved to San Francisco in 1970, and lived on the West Coast for seven years, four of those in Monte Rio, a Sonoma County town on the Russian River. He also lived in Baltimore (where he taught at Johns Hopkins University), New Orleans and Baton Rouge, publishing a book every year. During this time he wrote poetry, stories, essays and reviews for many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, and the Paris Review. He had regular columns in The Baltimore Sun, the City Paper, Architecture, Funny Times, Gambit Weekly, and Neon.