About

Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) was my first poetry collection. It grapples with the presumed suicide of my 18-year-old aunt a few months before my birth and the fact that 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 and alcoholism. It took years for these poems to find each other and coalesce into a book.

My next collection is a chapbook, Inside the Snake Farm, coming out from Lily Poetry Review Books in 2027. In it are poems that explore my life-long snake phobia, a terror that knows no bounds.

My poems are 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 pro-Palestinian of the Jewish persuasion, 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. Teaching video and photography skills to teens in Somerville, MA while raising money to keep that work afloat, led to a career in philanthropy, developing funds for 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 and now poetry co-editor, I’m fortunate to be part of a vibrant literary community, collaborating with other editors, writers, and visual artists to produce and promote work that inspires and sometimes incites.