Cynthia Zarin was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She writes for a wide range of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, where her poems frequently appear.
The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundations, and a winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Award, Zarin is an artist- in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. She has published two previous volumes of poetry, Fire Lyric and The Swordfish Tooth, as well as several books for children. Rose and Sebastian and What Do You See When You Shut Your Eyes? are her picture books for children which encourage her preschool audience to look at things from a fresh perspective.
In her third book of poetry, her first in eight years, Cynthia Zarin, one of the finest poets of her generation, has turned her art to fresh purposes. Taking up the subject of divorce, splintering and re-forming of family are the features in Zarin’s writing which has been compared to that of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her works address the passage through a time of guilt and sorrow in an oblique yet a precise tone that is unique in contemporary poetry. Zarin writes formal verse as well as freer modes, often employing complicated stanza forms and inventive rhymes.
