Andrei Codrescu

a poet, novelist, and essayist born in Transylvania.  In 1966, he moved to Detroit.  He is the author of dozens of books of poetry, including Jealous Witness (2008), It Was Today (2003), and his debut, License to Carry a Gun (1970), which won the Big Table Poetry Award.  He is also the recipient of the 2005 Ovidius Prize.  In 1983 he founded Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas.  Nonfiction, includes the retelling Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments (2011); The Poetry Lesson (2010), a teaching memoir; The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess (2009); and the memoir The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (1991).  He wrote and starred in the 1993 documentary film Road Scholar, for which he won a Peabody Award as well as Best Documentary awards from the Seattle International Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival.  He can be heard regularly on National Public Radio’s program “All Things Considered.”  He has taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University, where he was the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English until his retirement in 2009.  He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.