Poet, novelist, and essayist Andrei Codrescu was born Andrei Perlmutter in Transylvania, Romania. He moved to Detroit in 1966 and eventually settled in New Orleans. In his earliest poetry workshops he was encouraged to change his name. He first took the surname Steiu, and then adopted Codrescu.
Codrescu’s poetry explores themes of identity, exile, and transformation with bold irreverence.
Codrescu 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. His collection of poems, So Recently Rent a World, New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012, was long-listed in 2013 for the National Book Award.
Codrescu 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.