Raluca Barbu (formerly Marchiș) is a published author in Romania who relocated to the United States in 2019. She now lives with her daughter and husband in Illinois. Apart from writing, she has worked for over fifteen years in sales, public relations, and marketing for some of Romania's most influential companies. She currently works as an Adult Programming Specialist for an area public library in the Northwestern suburbs of Chicago.

Books by the same author:

• Oraşul din viaţa mea (My City Within), a memoir on surviving life as a YA. Grinta Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2007
• Corporatistul (The Corporate Man), a novel about losing and finding oneself while working for a multinational corporation. Tracus Arte Publishing House, Bucharest, Romania, 2012
• Selfie în oglindă. Când femeia devine mamă (Selfie In the Mirror: When a Woman Becomes a Mother), a non-fiction book on motherhood. Herald Publishing House, Bucharest, Romania, 2014
She has also written for LaPunkt.ro as a movie critic, for Apostrof, the Romanian Writers’ Union magazine, and Acribia, the Librarianship College paper in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (back in the 2000s). For five consecutive years, she wrote social and cultural pieces on her own platform, ralucabarbu.ro, which later became her fourth book, Terapie prin scris (Writing Therapy).

Her latest book, American Vacation. 12,000 Miles Into the Wild West is a travel book about the United States and its most iconic Western landmarks, seen through the eyes of a Romanian writer. It is in many respects one-of-a-kind because no other Romanian author has traveled and written about the American West. It provides a foreign writer’s take on the American landscape and tourism through the eyes of a former citizen of a communist country. It is a homage given both to the beauty of the American outdoors and to the way nature is respected and preserved by the authorities and visitors. What makes it special though is the travel narrative that Raluca has brought back as a literary genre. In a world of Google reviews, travel blogs, and vacation guides, she manages to shine a light on the lost art of travel memoirs.