Cynthia L. Haven is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and author of 2018's Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, the first-ever biography of the French theorist. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, as well as a visiting writer and scholar at Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Her Joseph Brodsky: Conversations was published in 2003. Her"Spirit of the Place": Czeslaw Milosz in California is forthcoming. She has written for The Times Literary Supplement, and has also contributed to The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and others. Her work has appeared in Russia's Zvezda and Colta.