Cynthia Haven

Cynthia L. Haven is an American literary scholar, author, critic, Slavicist, and journalist. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.

Education While at the University of Michigan, she was awarded two prestigious Hopwood Awards and studied with Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky.

Publications 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.

Recognition She was awarded a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellowship with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna 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. She is on the faculty of the University of Saint Thomas in Houston.

Books

All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2023; New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2024). Warum kämpfen wir? Und wie hören wir auf? (Leipzig: Reclam, 2022). Czesław Miłosz: A California Life (Berkeley: Heyday, 2021; Kraków: Znak, 2024). The Man Who Brought Brodsky Into English: Conversations with George L. Kline (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021). Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018). Everything Came to Me at Once: The Intellectual Vision of René Girard(Belmont, NC: Wiseblood, 2017). Iosif Brodskii: Conversazioni (Milan, Italy: Adelphi, 2015). An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz (Athens, Ohio: Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2011). Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Literary Conversations Series, 2006). Three Poets in Conversation (London: Waywiser, 2006). Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven (London: Waywiser, 2005). Joseph Brodsky: Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Literary Conversations Series, 2003).