Cynthia Cruz is a poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the poetry collections Sweet Repetition (University of Chicago Press, 2025); Back to the Woods (Four Way Books, 2023); Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award; Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020); Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018); How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016); Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014); The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012); and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). Her debut novel was Steady Diet of Nothing (Four Way Books, 2023).

Cruz is also the author of The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (Repeater Books, 2021) and Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Book*hug, 2019). She is the editor of the anthology Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including the NewYorker, Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, BOMB, the American Poetry Review, and the Boston Review. Her essays, interviews, and book and art reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, and Guernica.

Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, Cruz grew up in northern California, where she earned a BA at Mills College. Cruz earned an MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in art writing at the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in German language and literature at Rutgers University.

Cruz has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst MFA writing program, and Columbia University’s MFA writing program. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University. She lives in Berlin, Germany.