Andrei Codrescu: The Romanian Poet Who Found His Voice in Louisiana

The Romanian Poet Who Found His Voice in Louisiana

Andrei Codrescu was born on December 20, 1946, in Sibiu, Romania. His mother was a photographer; his father an engineer. He didn't learn about his Jewish heritage until he was thirteen. In 1965, after the Israeli government paid the Romanian communist regime a per-person fee for Jewish emigration, Codrescu and his mother left Romania. They landed in Detroit in 1966, and young Andrei — who spoke virtually no English — immediately connected with the American literary underground.

He moved to New York's Lower East Side, fell in with Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets, and began publishing poetry that fused his Romanian sensibility with his adopted American voice. He founded Exquisite Corpse, an online literary journal of "books and ideas" that became one of the most influential independent literary platforms of its era.

NPR's Favorite Accent

In 1983, Codrescu became a regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, a position he held for over thirty years until 2016. His commentaries were immediately recognizable — the thick Romanian accent, the sardonic humor, the outsider's perspective on American culture that noticed things native-born Americans couldn't see. He became one of NPR's most beloved voices, offering observations that were simultaneously foreign and deeply American.

That same year, he joined Louisiana State University as MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English, a position he held until his retirement in 2009. Louisiana gave Codrescu what it gives every artist who sticks around: a place weird enough to match his imagination.

Awards and Words

Codrescu won the Peabody Award in 1995 for his film Road Scholar, received the prestigious Ovid Prize for poetry in 2005, won two Pushcart Prizes, and was nominated for the National Book Award. He published dozens of books of poetry, fiction, and essays. A Romanian refugee who arrived in America with no English became one of the country's most distinctive literary voices — and he did it from Baton Rouge, with a microphone and a typewriter and an accent that never faded.