Cynthia Cruz is the author of Hotel Oblivion (2022), Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018), How The End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012), and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, BOMB, and the Boston Review. She is the editor of an anthology of Latina poetry, Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University.

Cruz teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She has previously taught at the Juilliard School, Fordham University, the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program, Eugene Lang College, and in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University. Born in Germany, Cruz grew up in Northern California, where she earned her BA at Mills College. Cruz earned an MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in art writing & criticism at the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in German language and literature at Rutgers University. She has published essays, interviews, and book and art reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Guernica, and the American Poetry Review. Her collection of essays, Disquieting: Essays on Silence, an exploration of silence and power, was published in April of 2019 by Book*hug. She lives in Brooklyn. (Bio and photo from Poetry Foundation)

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Self Portrait