NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu to speak at Downtown campus

<p>Romanian writer and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu will be the keynote speaker at a literature conference at ASU's Downtown Phoenix campus at 5 p.m., Oct. 2. His talk is open to the public.</p><separator></separator><p>He will speak at the Southern Comparative Literature Association Conference, at the.ASU Mercado, Building C, room C340-350, at Fifth Street and Monroe.</p><separator></separator><p>Codrescu has been a commentator and poet-on-call for “All Things Considered” for 25 years, giving his wry twist on news culture and his vigilant observations of the world. An eager user of technology, he wrote most recently about borrowing his wife’s iPod, taking a voyeur’s trip through her life via music.</p><separator></separator><p>Having emigrated to the United States in 1965, he also wrote this month about returning to Romania in 1989 to report for NPR on the dramatic end to four decades of Soviet domination, hastened by the flow of information through the internet.</p><separator></separator><p>He has received a Peabody award for the PBS version of his film, “Road Scholar,” and has written 40 books of poetry, fiction and essays. Codrescu lives in New Orleans, where he is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University.</p><separator></separator><p>Also open to the public is a one-hour play in English featuring actors from the National Theatre of Romania, “The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War,” at 8 p.m., Oct. 1 at the Phoenix Urban Research Lab, 234 N. Central, eighth floor.</p><separator></separator><p>For more information visit the website: <a href="http://silc.asu.edu/scla/schedule">http://silc.asu.edu/scla/schedule</a… !supportEmptyParas]-->Media may contact Ileana Orlich, (480) 965-4658, <a href="mailto:ileana.orlich@asu.edu">ileana.orlich@asu.edu</a>.</p&gt;