Cristina A. Bejan

Green Horses on the Walls

[Cai verzi pe pereți]

poetry collection from Finishing Line Press

“Nothing prepared me for island life,” Cristina A. Bejan notes in a memorable poem of exile. The island of poetry has always been with her, a physical and spiritual island composed of people she loves or not, the dailiness of a lived and detailed life in her country of origin, the languages that express them. These poems infuse the English language with the pleasures of a world I loved surrendering to. She is a poet through and through, born that way, and generously ours now.

Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time like Now: New Poems (Pitt Poetry Series, 2019)

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CRISTINA A. BEJAN is a Romanian-American historian, theatre artist and spoken word poet based in Denver, Colorado. She grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and received her BA in philosophy from Northwestern University, where she also studied theatre. An Oxford DPhil and a Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, she has held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and has taught history at Georgetown and Duke Universities, among others. She currently teaches world history at Metropolitan State University of Denver. A playwright, Bejan has written eighteen plays, many of which have been produced in the United States, Romania, the United Kingdom and Vanuatu. She is founding executive director of the arts and culture collective Bucharest Inside the Beltway. Under the stage name “Lady Godiva,” she performs her poetry across the United States and Romania. She has written Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Green Horses on the Walls (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and is also a contributing author for The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Vol. 3 (University of Indiana, 2018). She has appeared on C-SPAN, and her work has been featured in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, American Prospect, Evenimentul Zilei and Observator Cultural. Bejan is on the Advisory Board of Alianța and is an advocate for NAMI and RAINN. For the Romanian diaspora in the US, she volunteers for ARCHER (the American Romanian Coalition for Human and Equal Rights) and Colorado's Romanian philanthropy organization RAFA (the Romanian-American Freedom Alliance). Bejan also serves as cultural editor for Hora in America magazine. She is a proud member of the Colorado Authors League, the International Center for Women Playwrights, and the Dramatists Guild of America.