Click here to watch the video on YouTube!
Friends, Sonomans, and the culturally curious,
on May 5th, 2022, at 7PM
Andrei Codrescu, star of page, screen, and NPR
will talk, read, and generally hold forth
at the Occidental Center for the Arts.
Refreshments / books for sale. Tickets are $25 GA/ $20 for OCA Members. Ticketholders will receive a poem by Andrei Codrescu in a limited handset letterpress broadside edition of 100, designed and printed by Pat Nolan and Eric Johnson at North Bay Letterpress Arts.
This event is sold out. Thank you for your support!
DOORS OPEN AT 6:30 PM.
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He is the author of over fifty books of poetry, fiction, critical essays, and commentary on art, life, and literature, averaging a book a year since his first publication, and including So Recently Rent A World—New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012, Blood Countess, The Posthuman Dada Guide, The Poetry Lesson, and In America’s Shoes. Codrescu’s latest poetry collection, Too Late for Nightmares, will be published in the Fall of 2022; a fantasy fiction novel, Meat from the Goldrush, is also slated for Fall of 2022. He is a recipient of the Ovid Prize for poetry, the Heritage Award from the American Immigration Council, a National Book Award Finalist, and two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. His poetry, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, and The Paris Review.
Andrei emigrated to the US in 1966, living in Detroit and then New York City where his first collection of poetry in English, License to Carry a Gun, was published in 1970. Determined to explore the vast opportunities presented him by his new homeland, he has lived in San Francisco, Monte Rio (California), Baltimore, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, currently making his home in Brooklyn. It was while living in Monte Rio from 1973 to 1977 that Codrescu wrote the first of his many autobiographical explorations, The Life And Times Of An Involuntary Genius.
Codrescu was the founder of Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books and Ideas, a distinctively radical entry into the conservative academic world of late century American letters. As the editor of the notable poetry anthology, Up Late, American Poetry Since 1970, he sptlighted a cross section of maverick modernist American poets often overlooked by the general public. Andrei taught literature and poetry at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University. A regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered, he received the Peabody Award for the documentary Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century, an American road saga which he wrote and narrated.
The New York Times has called him “one of our most magical writers.”
The Los Angeles Times proclaimed him “a Modern-day DeTocqueville.”
The Houston Chronicle noted that he is “among the most astute observers. . .of the American grain.”
The St. Peterburg Times commented that “if Andrei Codrescu still lived in Europe, he’d be a public intellectual consulted by presidents and ministers.”
Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti said Codrescu “creates a craving for the subversive.”