Cynthia Haven

Cynthia L. Haven is an American literary scholar, author, critic, Slavicist, and journalist. Her books include Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the top books of 2018. The biography was also named a 2019 CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. Her Czesław Miłosz: A California Life.[1] was a finalist for a Northern California Book Award. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna[1] and a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages while researching her book on French theorist René Girard. She was a Voegelin fellow at the Hoover Institution while working on her book on Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky and his translator, George L. Kline. She blogs at The Book Haven. She has written for a wide range of publications, including The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review.[2][1]

While at the University of Michigan,[3] she studied with Joseph Brodsky and won literary and journalistic awards, including two Hopwood Awards and a Broomfield Essay Prize

Her Penguin Modern Classics anthology for the selected writings of René Girard was published in June 2023, and a short German anthology was published in 2022 with the Leipzig publisher Reclam, for its popular "Was bedeutet das alles?" series.