Cynthia L. Haven is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and author most recently of Czesław Miłosz: A California Life. She is also the author of 2018’s influential Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the top books of the year. She has published two previous books on Miłosz: An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz and Czesław Miłosz: Conversations. 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. She has written for the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.