Born in Argentina in 1942, ARIEL DORFMAN spent ten years as a child in New York, until his family was forced out of the United States by the persecution of McCarthy. The Dorfmans ended up in Chile, where Ariel spent his adolescence and youth, living through the Allende revolution and the subsequent resistance inside Chile, and abroad after the dictatorship that overthrew Allende in 1973. Accompanied by the love of his life, Angélica, to whom he has been married for over fifty years, he wandered the globe as an exile, finally settling down in the United States, where he is now Walter Hines Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University, though he keeps a house in Chile where he and Angelica travel frequently. They are blessed with a large family and many dear friends. Dorfman’s acclaimed work (which includes the play and film Death and the Maiden and the classic text about cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck) covers almost every genre available (plays, novels, short stories, fiction, essays, journalism, opinion pieces, memoirs, screenplays). In all them, he has won major awards, leading to accolades from Time ("a literary grandmaster"), Newsweek ("one of the greatest novelists coming out of Latin America"), the Washington Post ("a world novelist of the first order") and the New York Times ("he has written movingly and often brilliantly of the cultural dislocations and political fractures of his dual heritage").
Heavyweight Champion Poet, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, and world-class raconteur, Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania in 1946, and immigrated to the United States in 1966. Author, translator, and anthologist of more than thirty-five books, Codrescu has edited the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse, and his provocative commentary is featured regularly on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His honors include the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar, the international Ovidius Prize, the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award, as well as a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for poetry. Codrescu currently resides in Arkansas, while continuing to serve as MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University.
