About
CRISTINA A. BEJAN is an award-winning Romanian-American historian, theatre artist and spoken word poet living and creating in Denver, Colorado. She grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and received her BA in Philosophy (Honors) from Northwestern University, where she also studied theatre. An Oxford DPhil and a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship and a Fulbright, she has held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and has taught history at five institutions of higher education, including Duke University. She currently teaches history at Metropolitan State University of Denver where she was selected as a Finalist for the 2021 Faculty Senate Teaching Award. A playwright, Bejan has written nineteen plays, many of which have been produced in the United States, Romania, the United Kingdom and Vanuatu. She writes creatively in five languages and has been published internationally in every genre she writes in: academic, theatrical, and poetry. She is founding executive director of the arts and culture collective Bucharest Inside the Beltway (BiB). Under her stage name “Lady Godiva,” she performs her poetry across the United States and Romania. She has written Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Green Horses on the Walls (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and is also a contributing author for The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Vol. 3 (University of Indiana, 2018). She has appeared on C-SPAN, and her work has been featured in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, American Prospect, Evenimentul Zilei and Observator Cultural. Bejan is on the Board of Directors for Immigrant Research Forum (Washington DC) and ARCHER (the American Romanian Coalition for Human and Equal Rights, Chicago, for which she serves as Vice President), and the Advisory Board of Alianța (Washington DC). She is an advocate for NAMI and RAINN and volunteers for Colorado's Romanian philanthropy organization RAFA (the Romanian-American Freedom Alliance). She is a proud member of the Colorado Authors League, the International Center for Women Playwrights, and the Dramatists Guild of America.
Featured Work
Green Horses on the Walls (Poetry)

2021 Independent Press Book Award winner! 2021 Human Relations Indie Book Award Gold Winner (Historical), Silver Winner (Reflection), Silver Winner (Realistic Poetry), and Honorable Mention (Personal Challenge Poetry)! Finalist for the 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist (Women's Issues), and the 2021 Colorado Authors League Book Award (Cover Design). "Green Horses on the Walls" is a collection of poems by Cristina A. Bejan. Many of these spoken word poems were part of the one-woman show entitled "Lady Godiva" (performed by Muslima Musawwir and directed by Star Johnson), which appeared at Source Theatre as part of the Mead Theatre Lab Program in February 2016 in Washington DC. Bejan writes about her Romanian heritage, the inherited trauma of communism, love, mental health and sexual assault. The poems capture Bejan's tortured love affair with the country her father escaped in 1969: Romania. Like so many exiles and migrants around the world, there is a compulsion to return and to leave the homeland. "I don't think it will ever stop," Bejan writes. Romania suffered a brutal communist dictatorship for forty years, and these poems reveal the horrors and the inherited trauma that are products of such historical injustice. She also tackles the sensitive topics of mental health and sexual assault and with this collection hopes to fight the pervasive stigma surrounding both issues. And finally this is a book about love: family love, love of ancestors, mindless youthful mistakes, the realities of American dating, forbidden love, and finally true equal miraculous love. The collection includes 28 original poems by Bejan and two translations by Bejan of poems by iconic Romanian poets Ana Blandiana and Nina Cassian. Bejan's poems are mostly in English, with Romanian and French making important appearances. All views expressed are the author's.