Meet Our Board of Directors

Andrei Codrescu

Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He is the winner of the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar, and Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Louisiana State University. He lives in NYC. His website can be found at https://www.codrescu.com.

Irena Grudzińska Gross

Irena Grudzińska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after student unrest of 1968. She taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory, New York, Boston and Princeton universities. She is the author of many essays, articles and books, including Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination. She edited books on literature and the transformation process and was responsible for the East-Central European Program at the Ford Foundation. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018. She lives in NYC.

Andrey Gritsman

A native of Moscow immigrated to the US in 1981, Andrey Gritsman is a physician, specialist in cancer diagnosis; he have published seven volumes of poetry in Russian and five collections in English. He received the 2009 Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention XXIII and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times between 2005 – 2010, and also was on the Short List for the PEN American Center Biennial Osterweil Poetry Award. His poems, essays, and short stories in English have appeared in more than 100 literary journals and were anthologized. His works were translated into several European Languages. He edits the international poetry magazine Interpoezia and run the Intercultural Poetry Series in New York.

Stefania Magidson

Stefania Magidson, Romanian born, is the founder and president of Blue Heron Foundation. In addition, Stefania is an author and a dedicated supporter of education and the arts. She is the Chair of the Romanian Program Committee/ South East European Film Festival, Member of the Dean’s Council at Tisch School of the Arts, Member, of the Advisory Board Roma People’s Project at the Hayman Center for Humanities at Columbia University, supporter of the Everychild Foundation and the Making Waves Film Festival. Stefania lives in Los Angeles.

Alka Mansukhani

Born in India, Alka Mansukhani is an educator and research scientist, a cultural figure and a passionate reader; she received a PhD in genetics from Cornell University, she was president of the New York chapter of AWIS, a resource organization for women in science, served on the NYAS committee that organized the science and technology platform for action for the UN conference on women; she is the co-vice president of Health Equity Initiative. She lives in NYC.

Dan Shafran

Born in Romania, Dan Shafran is a Swedish translator. He worked at the National Library of Sweden and is the Founding Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute of Stockholm. He has translated Romanian writers into Swedish and Swedish both prose writers and poets into Romanian, edited several anthologies, and he is the recipient of the Swedish Academy's Special Prize and the Nine Society's Translation Prize. He lives in Stockholm. His Wikipedia article can be found at sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shafran.