Cynthia Zarin

Senior Lecturer in English, Writing Concentration Coordinator

Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Ada Poems (2010), and Orbit (2017) as well five books for children and a collection of essays An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History (2013). Her honors and awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Award in Literature, the Peter B. Lavan Award, an Ingram Merrill Award for Poetry, The Los Angelels Times Book Award for Poetry (for The Watercourse) a Roger P. Lippincott Award for Consumer Reporting, the New York Women’s Press Award for Writing on the Arts, the Georgia Book Award for Writing for Children, and a Parent’s Choice Award for Children’s Literature. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, for which she currently writes regularly on about books and the theatre, as well as The New York Times and other publications, she is also a former contributing editor for Gourmet Magazine. Cynthia Zarin is an Artist-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Resident Writer for BalletCollective; ballets based on her poems, “The Impulse Wants Company,” and “Dear and Blackbirds” premiered in New York in 2013 and 2014, respectively.