Andrew Carroll

Andrew Carroll is an author, editor, and historian. He has edited several New York Times bestsellers. Andrew was the co-founder, with the late Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, of the American Poetry & Literacy Project, which distributed free poetry books throughout the U.S. The APL Project handed out more than 1,000,000 books in schools, hospitals, train stations, airports, hotels, jury waiting rooms, and other public places.

In 1998, Andrew founded the Legacy Project, an all-volunteer initiative that honors veterans and active-duty troops by preserving their wartime correspondence. Andrew has traveled to all 50 states and more than 40 countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has collected, to date, an estimated 90,000 previously unpublished letters (and emails) from every war in U.S. history. The Legacy Project is now the Center for American War Letters and is based at Chapman University.

In 2001, Andrew revived the “Armed Services Editions” (ASEs), which are pocket-sized editions of bestselling books given to servicemen and women during World War II. Andrew began working with major publishers in 2000 to reissue them, and he has distributed 500,000 free ASEs to U.S. troops around the world, including thousands of books he personally handed out in Baghdad and Kabul.

Andrew’s efforts have been profiled on NBC’s Nightly News, CNN, FOX News, PBS, The History Channel, NPR, CBS Sunday Morning, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and Nightline, and he was featured as a “Person of the Week” on ABC’s World News Tonight. Andrew has also been a contributing editor to numerous publications, including the New Yorker and TIME, and his op-eds and articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Details, US Airways Magazine, and National Geographic. He is also a regular columnist for American History magazine.

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; and the Chairman’s Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest award given by the chairman of the NEA.

Andrew lives in Washington, D.C., and Orange, California, where he is the director of the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University.