• National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry
• artist in residence at St. John the Divine.
• 2002, she received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Poetry

Criticism

Children

Anthologies

Cynthia Zarin's second collection, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark, memorable relief once the book has been closed. And that seems curious for a poet to whom seeing matters so very much; indeed, one of the collection's finest poems, "The Venetian Optician," presents a metaphysics of vision that informs nearly every poem in Fire Lyric.