Her father was a critic of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime; as a result of his persecution, the family migrated to the USA in 1989.
Her memoir of growing up in Romania, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police, was critically acclaimed and was nominated for the Orwell Prize.
She has also published a book on Seamus Heaney and East European poetry in translation.
Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into multiple European languages, e.g. in the Italian-language volume On the Side of Forgetting/Sulla Soglia della Dimenticanza (Edizione Kolibris, 2015).
She now teaches at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City and lives in Long Island with her husband and children.