Radu Vancu at PEN America World Voices Festival 2025
- RCI USA
- Apr 29
- 2 min read
Updated: May 26
About the Event
One of Romania’s most compelling literary voices is coming to the U.S., and he’s bringing poetry that resonates across borders and generations. With our support, poet and scholar Radu Vancu takes part in this year’s PEN America World Voices Festival, joining a standout panel dedicated to the art of dialogue in contemporary poetry. In a conversation with acclaimed poet Dunya Mikhail, moderated by poet and translator Nancy Naomi Carlson, Vancu will explore how poetry becomes a space of exchange—between writers, cultures, languages, and forms.
Meet the Writer
Radu Vancu (Sibiu, Romania, 1978) is a Romanian poet, novelist, scholar, and translator. Between 2019 and 2023, he has served as president of PEN Romania. He works as a professor at the Faculty of Letters and Arts at the „Lucian Blaga” University from Sibiu. He is editor-in-chief of the Transilvania magazine – and also an editor of the Poesis International magazine. He was the national editor of the Romanian section for the Poetry International website. Starting with 2002, he has published nine books of poems, for which he was awarded several prizes, both national and international; his poetry was translated in circa 20 languages, either in anthologies/magazines or as individual books. He has also published a novel, Transparenta (2018), and three volumes of a diary (2017, 2021, 2024), which were awarded several prizes. He has also published two children novellas and a book collecting his social & political articles. His scholarly publications include two book-length essays on Mihai Eminescu and Mircea Ivănescu, as well as a book on the anti-humanist poetics of modernity. He has coordinated several anthologies of modern and contemporary Romanian poetry, either alone or in collaboration with Mircea Ivănescu, Claudiu Komartin, or Marius Chivu. He has translated novels and poetry, mainly from the works of Walt Whitman and John Berryman; he is also the translator of the on-going four-volume Ezra Pound edition coordinated by H.-R Patapievici. He is the president of the International Poetry Festival in Sibiu Poets in Transylvania (2013- ongoing).
The World Voices Festival, founded in 2004 by Salman Rushdie, Esther Allen, and Michael Roberts is PEN America’s celebration of international literature and writers. Honoring our organization’s hundred-year history of uniting writers and readers to celebrate creative expression and the freedom to write for all, the Festival was founded in the wake of 9/11 to counter U.S. isolationism and broaden the channels of dialogue between the United States and the world. Taking place from April 30th through May 3rd with more than 100 writers from 35 countries, the 2025 festival will celebrate great writing and the power of storytelling against the current headwinds of attacks by those who seek to censor and silence. This gathering of writers from every part of the globe is a potent reminder—in fact, an antidote in an era of censorship—that books drive culture and identity, while empowering and transforming our lives. This festival embodies our belief that poets, authors, and journalists, that literature writ broadly is a bulwark against the rising tide of autocratic powers threatening democratic values.
