Welcome
I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, where I lived for the first twenty-six years of my life. I have written about those years in My Detroit: Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City and in Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. These books explore the roots of the fundamental ideas that have shaped my subsequent writing and activism.
I left Detroit with a fiercely anti-authoritarian mindset and a highly critical view of the ruling economic order. I have tried to use logic rather than faith and documentation rather than conjecture to advance my views. I advocate radical solutions to contemporary problems, but I think achieving something genuinely new also necessitates reanimating many traditional values.
I have written a dozen books and monographs on subjects as varied as cinema, radical movements, Native Americans, labor history, longevity, and Greek America. I also have written or edited five poetry collections. A list and descriptions of my work is available by contacting smyrnapress@hotmail.com.
In addition to my writing, I have edited or co-edited a number of journals involving Greek American Studies, cinema, and labor history. I've appeared on mass media television and radio in the United States, Canada, and Greece. Other media involvement has been as an interviewee in nearly a dozen documentary films, most dealing with cinema or Greek America. In 2015, Dan Georgakas: A Diaspora Rebel, a fifty-minute documentary biopic was produced for Greek National Television. It has since been screened in the United States and Europe.
I am currently editor of the American Journal of Contemporary Hellenic Issues, consulting editor of Cineaste film quarterly, a biweekly columnist for the National Herald, and Director of the Greek American Studies project at the Center for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies at Queens College.