Cynthia L. Haven is an American literary scholar, author, critic, Slavicist, and journalist. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
Cynthia L. Haven is an American literary scholar, author, critic, Slavicist, and journalist. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
While at the University of Michigan, [1] she was awarded two prestigious Hopwood Awards and studied with Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky.
Her books include Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best books of 2018. The biography was also named a 2019 CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. Her Czesław Miłosz: A California Life was a finalist for a Northern California Book Award. Leading critic and editor Leon Wieseltier wrote, “Her intuition is right: Czesław Miłosz and California are indeed a chapter in each other's history.”
Her books have been reviewed in The New York Review of Books,The Times Literary Supplement,World Literature Today,The San Francisco Chronicle,Harper's Magazine and many other publications.
Her Penguin Modern Classics anthology for René Girard, All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings was published in June 2023 in the U.K., and the following year in the U.S. She was the editor for a short German anthology on Girard, published in 2022 with the Leipzig publisher Reclam, for its popular "Was bedeutet das alles?" series.
She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna [2] 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 held the inaugural Milton Cottage Residency in Chalfont St. Giles, United Kingdom, in 2018. 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 . [3] [2] She was awarded the inaugural Novitāte award in Washington D.C., November 6, 1923. She was a guest of the city of Kraków in the summer of 2024, and gave the inaugural Miłosz Lecture . She gave the 2025 McDermott Lecture at the University of Dallas.
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