Author of nine poetry books, including Route, Now Voyager, and Waking Life. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
REVIEWS
“
Anderson's language is as spellbound as her subject, rising from the land itself, its alchemy of silence and time, from arias of beauty and melancholy...
Let her show you how to know the desert with new senses.
MARSHA DE LA O
Author of Antidote for Night
“
Through her lit and compassionate lens, readers
may too listen to the old language and know this star-pointed place “where
a spider web holds the
earth together."
JENNIFER K. SWEENEY
Author of Little Spells and How to Live on Bread and Music
“
Cynthia Anderson’s poetry dissolves arbitrary distinctions between non-human and human, creature and rock, inner and outer, past and present. These poems are a beautiful portrait
of the desert she loves.
CATHERINE SVEHLA, Ph.D.
Mythologist/Founder of Mythic Mojo and Myth in the Mojave
BIO
A California resident for over 40 years, Cynthia Anderson moved to the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park in 2008. Her recent poetry focuses on her family history and on the “old growth desert” around her home. Her poems appear frequently in journals such as the cherita, MacQueen's Quinterly, Failed Haiku, Femku, Verse Virtual, Spillway, Mojave River Review, Footnote, Cholla Needles, Silver Birch Press, and Writing in a Women's Voice.
Cynthia is co-editor of the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens, described by Jane Hirshfield as "a book whose heights, swoops, visions,
and versatile multiplicities
of flight-path are worthy of
the trickster-bird celebrated
in its pages."
In 2020, she was guest editor of Cholla Needles 46.
Author photo by Robert Morris
LISTEN/READ ONLINE
WATCH/LISTEN:
Video: Cynthia Anderson reading her poetry at the EP Foster Library in Ventura, California on August 17, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP-O0of10PY
Online radio interview "Desert Dweller: A Conversation with Poet Cynthia Anderson" by Dr. Catherine Svehla, Mythologist https://drcatherinesvehla.bandcamp.com/track/desert-dweller-a-conversation-with-poet-cynthia-anderson
READ:
Book Review of Waking Life by Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones Newsletter, 1.7.19
The Transmitter: Interviews on The Coil Magazine, Summer 2018
Cynthia Anderson Answers the Questions that Matter
Silver Birch Press, Landmarks Series, Camels at Font’s Point, August 2020 https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2020/08/21/camels-at-fonts-point-by-cynthia-anderson-landmarks-series/
Verse Virtual August 2020: Muscular Dystrophy, Paper Mill Hollow, The Dead Writer Returns
http://www.verse-virtual.org/2020/August/cynthia-anderson-2020-august.html
MacQueen’s Quinterly Issue 4, three micropoems: tethered to earth, wrinkles in time, the veins http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ4/Anderson-3-Poems.aspx
Mojave River Review, Vol. 5 No. 1, Spring/Summer 2019: Jackalopes,
Sounding, Yucca Man's Lament
https://issuu.com/mojaverivermedia/docs/mrr-vol5no1-spring-summer2019_final
Cynthia's poems have appeared in many anthologies, among them: San Bernardino Singing (Inlandia Books, 2020), Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018), Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology (Split Rock Review, 2018), Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2017) and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016).
CONTACT
Cynthia Anderson can be reached by email at
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