Cynthia Carr

Cynthia Carr is an American author, journalist, and cultural critic, who spent many years writing for The Village Voice. She is known for her deeply researched, intimate cultural biographies. Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar (2024) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Candy Darling (1944–1974) was a transgender actress and Warhol Superstar, best known for appearing in several Andy Warhol films and for Lou Reed's lyric 'Candy says' in the song of that name. Carr's biography is a comprehensive account of Darling's life, tracing her difficult childhood, her transformation in New York's underground art and drag world, her tragic early death from lymphoma, and the ways in which Darling's image has been reclaimed and celebrated in queer culture. Carr is also the author of Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America (2006), which investigated the 1930 lynching that took place in her own Indiana hometown, and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (1993), a survey of avant-garde performance art. Carr spent many years as a journalist covering the downtown New York arts scene for the Voice, where she developed her long-form approach to cultural biography. She lives in New York City.