Cynthia’s previous books are The Floating World, a dreamlike novel set in Tokyo and published by Ballantine, and The Demimonde in Japanese Literature: Sexuality and the Literary Karyukai, an academic monograph from Cambria Press. Her work will appear in the forthcoming Best Canadian Essays 2026 anthology (Biblioasis Publishing). She has also contributed fiction and nonfiction to Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Fire, Electric Literature, Salon, Asymptote Journal, storySouth, Witness, The Antigonish Review, Room, The Conversation, SLICE, Ruminate, The Offing, The Satirist, Enchanted Living, B O D Y, The Coil, The Bookends Review, Hippocampus Magazine, the Adventures in Bodily Autonomy short story anthology, and other publications.
In addition, she produces and hosts the interview podcast, A Real Affliction: BPD, Culture, and Stigma.
Her current projects are Age of Blossoms, a historical novel about the Japanese population of Mayne Island, British Columbia, on the eve of WWII; a nonfiction book about BPD that critiques the stigma and cultural artifacts surrounding it; and The Snow Queen, a literary historical novel. For The Snow Queen, she received a Fulbright grant to conduct research in Poland about two distant cousins, Helena Marusarzówna and Stanisław Marusarz, who served as ski couriers in the Polish resistance during World War II.
Cynthia holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, for which she studied twentieth-century literature in Japanese, English, and Spanish. She earned her MA at Berkeley and a BA in Asian Studies at Amherst College. She has taught literature and creative writing at Berkeley and the International College of Liberal Arts in Kofu, Japan.
Born in Boston and raised in Massachusetts and Florida, Cynthia has lived in four countries and is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada. She is a firm believer in the healing powers of writing, art, and education, which is a central theme in her creative writing.
Currently, she lives with her husband in Victoria, British Columbia, and teaches literature, academic writing, and interdisciplinary writing at Royal Roads University and the University of Victoria.
Contact Cynthia at cynthiagrallabooks@gmail.com.