Ion Cretu

Ion Crețu was born in Bărbulețu, Romania, and grew up and was educated in Alba Iulia. He graduated from Universității Babeș-Bolyai in Cluj with a degree in French in 1965 and worked for a time at Meridiane Publishing House. From 1973 to 1976 he studied toward a Ph. D. in Romance Languages at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, teaching both Romanian and French under a teaching assistantship while he studied. In the summer of 1976 he returned to Bucharest, Romania, to visit his parents and was denied permission to leave and return to the United States. During the ensuing years of living under the Communist regime of Nicolai Ceausescu, he was unable to do little more than occasional factory work, as he found himself blacklisted by the government from teaching positions, though he found ways to protest through writing. Shortly before the 1989 overthrow of the government, he was framed and arrested for possession of American currency and conducted a hunger strike before his rele