About

Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) is my first poetry collection. It grapples with the presumed suicide of my 18-year-old aunt a few months before my birth. We share a name, Cynthia May Bargar. With this collection I tried to weave together the unspoken/buried stories of my aunt’s death and my own mental health issues, alcoholism, and mental hospital adventures. It took years for these poems to find each other and coalesce into a book. I’m currently at work on a new collection that has to do with snakes, phobias, and pregnancy losses.

My poems are published or about to be published in many journals, online and in print: SWWIM, Sugar House Review, Verse Daily, The Lily Poetry Review, The Last Milkweed Anthology (Tupelo), Nixes Mate, On the Seawall, and Ocean State Review among others.

In addition to relishing the time I spend alone writing poems, I love working with people to resist the all-too-powerful systems of control and oppression that prevent us from enjoying lives filled with peace, security, and freedom. A long-time anti-zionist of the Jewish persuasion, I lived my first twenty years steeped in zionist propaganda. I was active in the student movement against the Vietnam War and the Sanctuary City movement, working to make Somerville, MA a Sanctuary City in 1987.

I’ve organized around immigrant rights, women’s rights, prisoners’ rights and struggles for racial, economic, and housing justice. I taught video and photography skills to teens in Somerville, MA while raising money to keep that work afloat. This led to a career in philanthropy, raising funds for and consulting with arts, social justice, and workers’ rights organizations, among others. For a dozen years, I served on the Board of Directors of Resist, a foundation that supports people’s movements for justice and liberation by redistributing resources back to frontline communities at the forefront of change.

As managing editor of Pangyrus LitMag for four years before transitioning to associate poetry editor in June of 2021, I became part of a vibrant literary community. I love collaborating with other editors, writers, and visual artists to produce and promote work that inspires and sometimes incites.

I live with my partner, cartoonist Nick Thorkelson and our ridiculous orange feline, JJ, in Provincetown, MA. Our daughter, artist and activist Ruby T , contributed the cover image for Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room. She recently got married and moved with her spouse, Alex Macias, from Provincetown to Louisville, KY.