Living Wills

Cynthia MacDonald was born in New York City on February 2, 1928. She was educated at the Brearley School, the Mannes School of Music, Bennington and Sara Lawrence College. She was an opera singer, who won the San Francisco Opera Auditions and sang on CBC Radio. After getting married, she became a poet. During her lifetime, she published six volumes of poetry including Alternate Means of Transport, Living Wills: New and Selected Poems, and I Can't Remember: Poems. She taught at Sarah Lawrence, Johns Hopkins University, and in 1979, she cofounded the University of Houston graduate creative writing program. She studied Freudian psychoanalysis at the Houston- Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute. She later joined the faculty of the Institute and maintained a psychoanalytic practice. She died on August 3, 2015 at the age of 87 after living with Alzheimer's for more than 10 years.

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