Cynthia Neely is a poet and a painter. She lives with her husband and son up an unmaintained mountain road in the Cascade foothills of North Central Washington and spends her summers on an off-grid island in Georgian Bay, Canada. These places have been indelibly etched into her persona and so into her poetry and paintings. The natural world and her place in it have always been important to her and to her work. When she travels from these areas she invariably heads north. Neely is the 2011 winner of the Hazel Lipa Poetry Chapbook Prize for Broken Water published by Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Her critical work has appeared in The Writers' Chronicle, and her poems in numerous print and online journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, and Terrain.org, and in several anthologies. Her full-length book of poetry, Flight Path, was published in 2014 as a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University.