Cindy King is the author of Zoonotic (2022), and two poetry chapbooks, Easy Street (2021) and Lesser Birds of Paradise (2022). Her latest poetry manuscript won the C&R Poetry Book Award and will be published in 2024. Her next chapbook will be released by Galileo Press in 2024.
Cindy’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, Callaloo, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, American Literary Review, Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. You can hear her online on American Weekend, a production of National Public Radio, at weekendamerica.publicradio.org, rhinopoetry.org, and at cortlandreview.com. Her work has also been chosen by former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to appear on NPR’s The Slowdown. She served as a featured Festival Poet at the 2022 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.
In 2023, she was a fellow at the Tin House Summer Workshop. She has also been awarded fellowships and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center, Colgate University, and other organizations.
Cindy was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. At 23, she moved to Mississippi and has lived most of her life as a naturalized Southerner. She has been teaching creative writing, poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction as an associate professor at Utah Tech University since 2016. She is also the faculty advisor of Weavers of Words, UT’s creative writing club, and faculty editor of The Southern Quill, UT’s literary arts journal, and Route 7 Review, Utah Tech’s digital journal. Cindy has a strong interest in community outreach and service learning, and she and her students have conducted creative writing workshops in St. George at Encircle and St. George Academy.
She is an editorial associate at both Seneca Review and TriQuarterly. She also enjoys serving on the Artistic Board for the Blank Theatre in Hollywood, California and reads scripts for their Living Room Series.