Ruxandra Cesereanu

	Fiction Non-Fiction Poetry Film Art MEB Authors Press Events Distribution Contacts	Ruxandra Cesereanu has firmly established herself as one of the most important and exciting contemporary writers in Romania’s poetry-rich culture. Born in 1963 in the city of Cluj-Napoca, the traditional cultural center located at the heart of the region of Transylvania, Cesereanu began publishing poetry in literary reviews in 1981, but her first book, a short novel, Voyage through the Looking-Glasses, came out only in 1989, the year Romanian communism was overthrown. She has published eight books of poetry and a book of short stories, The Purgatories (1997). She also writes significant nonfiction. Cesereanu’s study of Romanian political prisons, Journey to the Center of Hell: The Gulag in the Romanian Conscience. She lives and works in Cluj, where she is an editor of the cultural magazine Steaua (“The Star”), a faculty member at the University of Cluj, and one of the founders of Phantasma, the Center for Imagination Studies (1998), won the I. Negoizescu prize from the important literary and cultural review Ruxandra Cesereanu’s first two collections of poetry, Garden of Delights and Live Zone, both appeared in 1993, and in 1994 her third book, Fall Over the City, won the poetry prize of the Cluj Writers’ Association. Since then a collection translated into English, Schizoid Ocean (1997), came out in the United States, then in Romanian a year later, and The Crusader-Woman, selected poems, was published in Romania in 1999; a bibliophile edition, The Body—The Soul, was hand printed the year before. In 2000, she put out an anthology of dream-related Romanian poetry, Deliriums and Deliria, and a book-length essay on political torture in the twentieth century, Panopticon, on which she worked during the fall of 1999 as a Fulbright researcher at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University. Panopticon is the second part of a trilogy that began with her book on the Romanian Gulag and will conclude with a study of escapes from political prisons and concentration camps. Cesereanu published two books in 2002: Venice with Violet Veins, a new collection of poetry, and Tricephalos (her second novel). In translations by Adam J. Sorkin mostly with the poet, Cesereanu’s poetry has appeared in the United States in Great River Review, The Bitter Oleander, PMS, The Marlboro Review (which nominated her works for a Pushcart Prize), and The Jabberwock Review, as well as in Sorkin’s 1997 anthology (with Liviu Bleoca), Transylvanian Voices. Cesereanu also has written a book of three short fictions in Spanish, two of which have been translated and appeared in the United States.

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Distribution

Contacts

Ruxandra Cesereanu has firmly established herself as one of the most important
and exciting contemporary writers in Romania’s poetry-rich culture. Born in 1963
in the city of Cluj-Napoca, the traditional cultural center located at the heart of the
region of Transylvania, Cesereanu began publishing poetry in literary reviews in
1981, but her first book, a short novel, Voyage through the Looking-Glasses,
came out only in 1989, the year Romanian communism was overthrown. She has
published eight books of poetry and a book of short stories, The Purgatories (1997).
She also writes significant nonfiction. Cesereanu’s study of Romanian political prisons,
Journey to the Center of Hell: The Gulag in the Romanian Conscience. She
lives and works in Cluj, where she is an editor of the cultural magazine Steaua (“The Star”),
a faculty member at the University of Cluj, and one of the founders of Phantasma, the
Center for Imagination Studies (1998), won the I. Negoizescu prize from the important
literary and cultural review
Ruxandra Cesereanu’s first two collections of poetry, Garden of Delights and Live Zone,
both appeared in 1993, and in 1994 her third book, Fall Over the City, won the poetry
prize of the Cluj Writers’ Association. Since then a collection translated into English,
Schizoid Ocean (1997), came out in the United States, then in Romanian a year later,
and The Crusader-Woman, selected poems, was published in Romania in 1999; a bibliophile
edition, The Body—The Soul, was hand printed the year before. In 2000, she put out an
anthology of dream-related Romanian poetry, Deliriums and Deliria, and a book-length
essay on political torture in the twentieth century, Panopticon, on which she worked
during the fall of 1999 as a Fulbright researcher at the Harriman Institute of Columbia
University. Panopticon is the second part of a trilogy that began with her book on the
Romanian Gulag and will conclude with a study of escapes from political prisons and
concentration camps. Cesereanu published two books in 2002: Venice with Violet Veins,
a new collection of poetry, and Tricephalos (her second novel). In translations by Adam J.
Sorkin mostly with the poet, Cesereanu’s poetry has appeared in the United States in
Great River Review, The Bitter Oleander, PMS, The Marlboro Review (which nominated her
works for a Pushcart Prize), and The Jabberwock Review, as well as in Sorkin’s 1997
anthology (with Liviu Bleoca), Transylvanian Voices. Cesereanu also has written a book of
three short fictions in Spanish, two of which have been translated and appeared in the United States.