Cynthia Weiner

Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story “Boyfriends” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Recently, her story “A Castle In Outerspace” was republished in Coolest American Stories 2024. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City.

A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was inspired by her upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1980s, and particularly by the infamous “Preppy Murder” of 1986, to which she had a personal connection, having spent many nights drinking with the real-life Preppy Killer and his friends at Dorrian’s (the model for Flanagan’s bar) that summer.

Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.