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Martha Cinader

A poet who performs with Jazz musicians.

About Me

Martha Cinader graduated with honors from The Spence School in New York City in 1980. Fascinated by Jazz and the underground music scene in New York City, she worked as a fashion model and spent a lot of time listening to live music. Her first published piece of writing was an interview with the jazz musician Monty Waters, that was published in The East Villager. She traveled with her partner around Europe for six years, on what could barely be called a circuit of expatriate jazz musicians. Leaving from Munich she returned to New York City with a three year old daughter in 1990.

She was a producer and on-air host for most of the nineties at WBAI Radio 99.5FM where she produced a weekly arts magazine, and also wrote and produced twelve episodes of Marvelina, a science fiction radio drama, and four episodes of Mission of Love, later produced as a two act play written in iambic pentameter at Club Vinyl. She also hosted a weekly arts magazine for which she produced numerous author interviews. Some of them are transcribed in her ebook American Authors Unplugged, available exclusively at cinader.com.

Cinader hosted a weekly performance series called Listen & Be Heard, and developed a repertoire of poetry with music, returning to Europe on a few small tours, and appearing at jazz and poetry festivals in New York and California. Most of that material was recorded on a CD entitled Living It! The title cut, was put out on vinyl, by Liquid Sound Lounge Records, and persists as an underground hit, and is included on several compilations around the world, including Universal Music France.

While hosting the performance series Cinader developed a series of biographical stories about fascinating people in history and was invited to perform them at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Upon her return, the stories were published by Tenth Avenue Editions in a slim volume entitled Dreamscape: Real Dreams Really Make a Difference. The second edition was released in March 2015.

Her second book published is When the Body Calls, a collection of poetry and fairy tales, and entries in the journal of Senator Sin, was published by Writers and Readers, Harlem River Press in 1999.

She also had a short poem/story published in an anthology called Dick for a Day (Villard Books) under the pen name Senator Sin, that Publisher’s Weekly called “hilarious.”

After growing weary of eviction notices in New York City, she moved to Vallejo, California, located in the bay area, in 1999. She continued Listen & Be Heard there, where she met her future husband. Together they started a newspaper called Listen & Be Heard Weekly that reached a run of 6000 copies of around 40 pages a week, and was distributed around the bay area. They also opened Listen & Be Heard Poetry Cafe, which became renowned in the area. They ran both businesses for five years, before closing down in 2008, and moving to Greenville, South Carolina in 2009.

Currently gardening, cooking and preserving their own food while raising their three growing boys, Cinader blogs about being a virgin homesteader, among other things, and is available for poetry and storytelling events in the region. Her forthcoming novel Marvelina, is a fairy tale for grown women.

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