Cynthia L. Haven was born in Detroit and educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she studied with the late Joseph Brodsky and earned two prestigious Avery Hopwood Awards for Literature. After receiving her university degree, she moved to London and worked at Vogue, Index on Censorship , and a short-lived Third-World newsweekly on Fleet Street, the World Times .
Currently, she is a literary critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and writes regularly for The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post Book World, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, San Francisco Magazine, and the Poetry Foundation. Her work has also been published in Civilization, Commonweal, The Kenyon Review, and The Georgia Review. She has been affiliated with Stanford University for many years, and is a regular contributor to its magazine. She has a proven history of negotiating in foreign environments, landing on her feet quickly and filing stories from from Alexandria to St. Petersburg, from Oberammergau to Petrópolis, Brazil.
She is a 2007/08 Milena Jesenská Fellow, and a recipient of over a dozen literary and journalism awards. Her most recent books are Joseph Brodsky: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Miss., 2003; Adelphi Edizioni, Milan, 2005), Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven (BTL, London, 2005), Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Miss., 2006) and "Timothy Steele in Conversation with Cynthia Haven", in Three Poets in Conversation: Dick Davis, Rachel Hadas, Timothy Steele (BTL, London, 2006). Czeslaw Milosz: Memories and Recollections, forthcoming with Ohio University Press, has received a Kosciuszko Foundation grant.