RCI New York Reads Adriana Carcu and Ioana Ieronim

Two of the most compelling Romanian authors living abroad, Adriana Carcu from Heidelberg, Germany, and Ioana Ieronim from Washington, D.C., reunite at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York to entice their American readers with their newest books in English - The Long Way Home (New Meridian Arts, 2021) and Lavinia & Her Daughters. A Carpathian Elegy (Cervena Barva Press, 2020), respectively. Get ready for an evening of exciting readings and passionate eloquence in the company of two consummate writers.

Join us in person on Friday, October 6 at 7 PM! Please follow this link to let us know that you are coming.

The Long Way Home by Adriana Carcu

Adriana Carcu's latest book of prose, a bildungsroman of migration, consists of 63 juxtaposed short stories knit into a large biographical narrative. The texts from The Long Way Home, capturing major past events and recent years experiences, accompany the narrator’s lifepath from early childhood to present day. The pivotal point of the narrative is the night of the narrator’s passage from Romania to Germany. The stories following this point of transition map the strenuous process of adaptation; the imperceptible detachment from the home country, the “aerial roots syndrome”, and the progressive integration into a new system. The transition process is accompanied by recurrent recollections of earlier life, which are gradually replaced by portraits and latter-day life experiences, enveloped in an evanescent nostalgic aura.

Lavinia & Her Daughters. A Carpathian Elegy by Ioana Ieronim. English version by Adam Sorkin and the author

This is the story of a widow who travels with her two young daughters from her port city on the Black Sea to the village of her husband’s kin: a small rural community in the Romanian Carpathians. There, she succeeds in raising her daughters through strength of character and hard work as the village seamstress. Thus in this novel-like poem (in mixed modes, prose poetry with interspersed lyrical passages), the protagonist serves as a shrewd perceptive witness who knows everybody and a muted voice through which we hear the villagers of this mountain locale with its pastoral heritage. The events take place at a margin of space on the still remembered border between the former Austrian and the Ottoman empires and a thin, transitional margin of time: the Soviet takeover following World War II. The new order would ultimately destroy the timeless lifestyle that had survived in the Carpathians well into the twentieth century and beyond.

Adriana Carcu is a writer and international cultural journalist. She signs a permanent column in Orizont / Horizon magazine and contributes to numerous cultural magazines and websites. She was born in the Romanian city of Timișoara and has been living in Heidelberg, Germany, since 1988. She spends the summer in the Carpathian village of Ciclova Montana, Romania, where she manages numerous cultural projects. She is a member of the Romanian Writers' Association, of the writers' international organization EXIL PEN, and of the prestigious German Female Artists Association GEDOK. Last summer, Adriana published the volume Ascultați / Listen, the third book in an auto-fiction series. The Long Way Home was published by NYC-based New Meridian Arts in 2021. In 2019 she published a volume about Nordic Jazz – Das Lied aus dem Norden. In 2017 she authored Auriu / Golden, summing up in 56 miniatures five years of reading and life experience. In 2016, her book Jazz Stories appeared both in Romanian and English. In 2014, Adriana published Povestiri din vremea de după / Stories from the Aftertime, a volume that records 12 encounters with artist friends in an act of biographical recuperation. In 2012 she published Cronica sentimentală / A Sentimental Chronicle, 2009 being the year of her debut with a volume of narrative interviews entitled Povestea zilelor noastre / The Story of Our Days.

Ioana Ieronim is the author of several collections of poems and two volumes of narrative poetry, Triumph of the Water Witch (with multiple editions, including in England and Germany) and Lavinia & Her Daughters. A Carpathian Elegy (a revised edition of Egloga, translated by Adam J. Sorkin with the author and published in the US). Her recent books of poetry in Romanian are: Passage; Portraits Self-Portraits; and ZOOM, Bucharest. Online she published: Gowns (theater play in Romanian); Omnivorous Syllables, Ariadne’s Veil (collections of verse in English); When Big Is Not Beautiful; The House of the People (collage and verse). She participated in multimedia shows (in Romania and the US). She also published studies on the Balkan and Israeli drama. She translated extensively poetry and drama, from Shakespeare to Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner a.s.o. She was an editor for foreign encyclopedias before 1990, then cultural journalist, Romania’s cultural attaché in Washington DC, and Fulbright program director in Bucharest. She is a recipient of the “M.Eminescu” Prize of the Romanian Academy and a member of PEN Romania and the Romanian Writers’ Association.