Andrew Carroll is a bestselling author, historian, playwright, and public speaker, and he is currently the director of the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University and co-founder of Americans for Ukraine.

In 1992, Andrew co-founded, with the Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, the American Poetry & Literacy (APL) Project, which distributed more than 1,000,000 free poetry books in schools, hospitals, hotels, train and subway stations, airports, supermarkets, and other public places throughout the United States.

Andrew’s first New York Times bestseller, LETTERS OF A NATION: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters, was published in 1997. A year later, and inspired particularly by the war letters he found while researching the book, Andrew created the Legacy Project, an all-volunteer initiative to honor veterans, active-duty troops, and their family members by preserving their wartime correspondences. Andrew has traveled to all 50 states and to more than 40 countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has collected an estimated 100,000 letters (and emails) from every war in U.S. history. Andrew donated this massive collection, free of charge, to Chapman University.  Through his work with the Center, Andrew continues to seek out, preserve, and bring attention to the importance of saving war-related letters and emails.

Andrew has edited two other New York Times bestselling books, WAR LETTERS and BEHIND THE LINES, both of which feature hundreds of previously unpublished correspondences from American conflicts. WAR LETTERS was the basis of the critically acclaimed PBS documentary of the same name, and the audio version of the book was nominated for a Grammy in the “Spoken Word” category.

Andrew has given keynote speeches at numerous prestigious venues nationwide, including several presidential libraries, more than 100 local historical societies and museums, the Library of Congress, the National Book Festival, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, West Point, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, the U. S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy, the Pentagon, the American Red Cross, and TEDx Santa Barbara.

Andrew has also been a contributing editor to the New Yorker and TIME, and his op-eds and articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, USA Today, AARP Bulletin, and National Geographic.

A 1993 magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University, Andrew has received, among other accolades, the Daughters of the American Revolution’s “Medal of Honor”; “The Order of Saint Maurice,” bestowed by the National Infantryman’s Association; “The Free Spirit Award,” presented by the Freedom Forum; the “Columbia College Young Alumni Achievement Award”; and the “Chairman’s Medal” from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest award given by the chairman of the NEA.