Born in Sibiu, Romania, AndreiI Codrescu published his first poems in the Romanian language under the pen name Andrei Steiu. In 1965 he left the country to escape from the communist regime. After time in Italy, he emigrated 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, where 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, and actively participating in literary life by writing 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. He has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s news program, All Things Considered, since 1983. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for the film "Road Scholar", an American road saga that he wrote and starred in, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He has been called “one of our most magical writers” by The New York Times
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