Cristina Nehring is an award-winning essayist, literary critic and travel writer, known for her contrarian stances on issues as various as safe sex and book festivals. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s the Atlantic Monthly, Conde Nast Traveler, the London Review of Books, the American Scholar, and the New Republic. She has done graduate studies at Stanford, the Sorbonne and UCLA, and has her Ph.D.in literature.
In 2009, Cristina published A Vindicationof Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century, a book which proposes more daring and imaginative models for modern loving. In attacking contemporary pieties from the cult of safe love to the assumption that an enlightened feminist should not be a sentimental romantic, Cristina made a lot of enemies. She also made a lot of friends: Vindication (which take its name from Mary Wollstonecraft’s 18th-century Vindication of the Rights of Woman) was hailed on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review as “one of those rare books that could change the way we think about our intimate lives.”
The day the review appeared was the day, also, that Cristina’s beloved half-Greek daughter, Eurydice, was diagnosed with leukemia. The now two-year-old Eurydice and her mother have lived in the UCLA Children’s Hospital since 2009. They are expected to re-enter the real world in July. Eurydice is the subject of Cristina’s work-in-progress: Bornto Fly: A Book of Tragedy and Transformation.
