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. Her second collection "The Glimmering Room" published by Four Way Books and launched at the contemporary art gallery Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden, was also reviewed by the New York Times alongside the poet C. K. Williams. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker 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 Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Princeton University.
She is currently the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton University. She previously taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College, the Juilliard School. Fordham University, Eugene Lang College, 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.