Poetry. Reader, take heed: These are no ordinary poems about childhood. In a series of secular prayers, Cynthia Cruz alludes to a girlhood colored by abuse and a brother's death. A beautifully understated sense of menace and damage pervades this vivid, nonlinear tale. "Cynthia Cruz's passionate, intense poems inhabit a landscape of fates and fatal hungers, nightmares and dangerous desires, in which enchantment and terror are so intimate that they become one"--Reginald Shepherd. Cynthia Cruz holds degrees from Mills College and Sarah Lawrence College and has received several residencies to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
About the author: Cynthia Cruz is a contemporary American poet. Her first collection of poems, Ruin, was published by Alice James Books in 2006, and reviewed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Library Journal and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Brown Paper, Boston Review Denver Quarterly Guernica and The Paris Review, and in anthologies including Isn't it Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets (Wave Books, 2004), and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, edited by the late poet Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press, 2004). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Yadoo and the MacDowell Colony. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is an adjunct lecturer in English at Queens College. She previously taught writing and literature at Fordham University and Westchester Community College. She has also taught writing in homeless shelters, and to women in the eating disorder ward of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and to children in the West Bank. Her work with children includes tutoring homeless children in reading and writing, and teaching literature and writing to at-risk teenagers, and elementary school students. Born in Germany, Cruz grew up in northern California, where she got her B.A. at Mills College. She earned her M.F.A. at Sarah Lawrence College. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
