August 19, 1990, and the response was immediate and overwhelming. The sheer audacity of publishing such a clearly subversive poem in a national publication amazed the Albanians (and soon after the international community as well). Within hours, copies of Drita sold out across the country, so people took to scrawling the poem on scraps of paper and passing it to one another in the subways and on the streets. Months later, protesters chanted the poem through megaphones during anti-government demonstrations. Seen from this point of view, "Marinaj's words inspired freedom [and] helped defeat communism in Albania." Nevertheless, "having seen other poets hanged in the city's center for voicing similar notions of freedom and liberty, Marinaj knew that he had to leave the country immediately; he packed a few of his favorite books, told his friends and family that he was going on vacation, and set off on an eight-hour hike over the mountains and into Yugoslavia." Education in America After his education in Albania, Marinaj earned an associate degree in science from Brookhaven College, in 2001. He continued his education at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he graduated magna cum laude in 2006 with a bachelor's in literary studies, followed by a master's degree in the same subject in 2008. Three years later, he received a certificate in Holocaust Studies from the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Dallas awarded Marinaj a PhD in 2012. His dissertation, which focus on the history and philosophy of oral poetry in the Balkans and on translation theory, is titled "Oral Poetry in Albanian and Other Balkan Cultures: Translating the Labyrinths of Untranslatability." Protonism Theory According to The Dallas Morning News, Marinaj's "Protonism Theory" seeks to "promote peace and positive thinking" through literary criticism. In 2011, Marinaj's first book-length articulation of Protonism Theory, in Protonism: Theory Into Practice, received the Albanian BookerMan Prize for Literature from the National Media Group of Tirana, Albania. Protonism Theory argues that each critic's personal interests and biases influence the degree of emphasis placed on critically assessing strong and weak points in a given work of literature. Marinaj formulated Protonism Theory in 2005 as a response to the flood of unduly negative criticism in East European academia following the collapse of communism. As an alternative form of literary criticism, Protonism aims to provide a common ground from which critics can