Ileana Nachescu is a writer and a scholar. She grew up in socialist Romania and came of age during the uprising that ended state socialism in her country and the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. She came to the United States as an international graduate student and completed a doctorate in women’s studies. Her essays have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Rumpus, the Atticus Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a full-length collection, Memoirs of a Socialist Childhood.