Tethered to the Unexpected

Join us on Saturday, April 16 at 1 pm EDT for a poetry reading and discussion with poet Roxana Cazan about her latest book Tethered to the Unexpected. The event, organized by American Romanian Cultural Society (ARCS) in partnership with Romanians of DC, Arizona American-Romanian Cultural Collaborative (ARCC), Immigration Research Forum, and Bucharest Inside the Beltway with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute in NY/USA, is moderated by Otilia Baraboi and features as guest speakers Clara Burghelea and Domnica Rădulescu.

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIvc-6uqD4sH9DJ3joEKQsC2gUhS4j95jKN

Tethered to the Unexpected is a lyrical treat despite its grim truth. Roxana Cazan offers a loving, lasting tribute to familial bonds though “some days the windows / don’t withstand the rain.” […] Beyond a body in decline, Roxana’s unassuming voice explores her grandmother’s life, tethered to her own, attempting to close the “distance / between home and crib.”– Ken Hada, author of Contour Feathers. You can read more about Roxana Cazan’s book on her website: https://roxanalcazan.weebly.com/books.html

Before teaching at the University of Oklahoma, Roxana L. Cazan taught literature, creative writing, and women’s studies courses at Saint Francis University in Pennsylvania. She is an interpreter and translator of Romanian and a poet. Her poems have been featured in Poets Reading the News, The Windsor Review, Cold Creek Review, Construction Literary Magazine, Glass Lyre Press, Adanna Literary Journal, Watershed Review, The Portland Review, Harpur Palate and others. Her full-length poetry books are The Accident of Birth (Main Street Rag 2017) and Tethered to the Unexpected (Alien Buddha Press 2022). Roxana’s scholarly work focuses on ethnic and postcolonial literature and women’s studies and has appeared in Neophilologus, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, American Journal of Undergraduate Research, and Demeter Press. A chapter is forthcoming in Remembering Kahina: Women, Representation and Resistance in Post-Independence North Africa, Routledge. She is the co-editor of the anthology, Voices on the Move: An Anthology by and about Refugees, Solis Press, 2020.

Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, Waxwing, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. Her second poetry collection, Praise the Unburied, was published with Chaffinch Press in 2021. She is Poetry Co-Editor of the museum of americana and Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation.

Domnica Rădulescu is an American writer of Romanian origin, living in the United States where she arrived in 1983 as a political refugee, having escaped the communist dictatorship of her native Romania. She settled in Chicago where she obtained a master’s degree in Comparative literature and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Chicago. She is the Edwin A. Morris Professor of Comparative Literature at Washington and Lee University. Rădulescu is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Train to Trieste (Knopf 2008 &2009), Black Sea Twilight (Transworld 2011 & 2012) and Country of Red Azaleas (Hachette 2016) and of award-winning plays. Train to Trieste has been published in thirteen languages and is the winner of the 2009 Library of Virginia Fiction Award. Rădulescu received the 2011 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and is twice a Fulbright scholar. She also published fourteen non-fiction books, edited and co-edited collections on topics ranging from the tragic heroine in western literature to feminist comedy, to studies of exile literature to theater of war and exile, refugee art, and two collections of original plays. Two of her plays, Exile Is My Home and The Town with Very Nice People were runners up for the Jane Chambers Playwriting award in 2012 and 2013. Dream in a Suitcase. The Story of an immigrant Life is her first memoir and it has been released from Austin Macauley Publishers in December 2021.