Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz is a poet, essayist, professor and critic. Born in Germany on a US Air Force base,[3] Cruz grew up in Germany and northern California. In an interview with Columbia Journal, she says her family moved often, living in 20 different places by the time she was in kindergarten.[4] The first of her family to attend college, her father is Mexican-American and was a field worker. Her mother is German.

She earned her B.A. at Mills College. She earned her M.F.A. at Sarah Lawrence College as well as an MFA in Art Writing & Criticism at the School of Visual Arts. Cruz is currently pursuing her PhD in German from Rutgers University.[5]

She has published essays, book and art reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Commune, Hyperallergic, the American Poetry Review, and the Rumpus. She currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.[1][6] She has previously taught at the Juilliard School, Fordham University, the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program and Eugene Lang College.

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.[7] Her second collection The Glimmering Room was published by Four Way Books[8] and launched at the contemporary art gallery Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden; it was also reviewed by The New York Times alongside the poet C. K. Williams.[9][10] Her third collection, Wunderkammer, was published in 2014 by Four Way Books.

She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including BOMB Magazine,'The New Yorker[11] AGNI,[12] The American Poetry Review,[13] 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 poet Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press, 2004). She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Princeton University.[14][15] In spring of 2019 Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays, was published by Book*hug. A second collection of cultural criticism, The Melancholia of Class, will be published by Repeater Books in 2021.[16]

In 2010 she was the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton University.[15]

Cruz often cites her family's working class background and nomadism as influences.[4] Her creative and theoretical work is informed by Continental Philosophy and psychoanalysis, in particular, the work of Hegel, Freud and Lacan. Recent work has focused on Lacan's theory of LACK in relation to the anorexic. Relatedly, Cruz's current theoretical work connects Lacan's concept of LACK, his theory of the anorexic, trauma, and the unfathomable.[17]

Cruz is editor, with the visual artist, Steven Page, of the interdisciplinary journal, Schlag Magazine. [18]

Her book The Melancholia of Class will be published by Repeater Books in 2021.