Cynthia Moore is an award-winning playwright and performer who wrote and directed theater for over twenty years. A founding member of Otrabanda Company, she also worked in the Honolulu Theatre for Youth and the women’s collective Lilith before joining the Blake Street Hawkeyes. In 1990, she left the theater to earn a master’s degree in clinical psychology. She has now worked as a mental health counselor for twenty-three years, with a particular focus on the healing connection between spirituality and trauma. She has also taught numerous workshops in creativity, writing from the heart, and more. Cynthia lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, David.

In Dancing on Coals, Cynthia Moore describes a multi-decade, harebrained search for love in all the wrong places, starting when her narcissistic mother abandons her to a Swiss finishing school. Devastated by her mother’s betrayal, eleven-year-old Cynthia vows to become acceptable—but to whom?

Seeking approval first as a madcap performance artist and then an as over-functioning therapist, our narrator is finally forced to abandon her competitive, masculine compulsivity for a genuine quest for inner truth. Ultimately, she finds her voice, develops her gifts, and discovers love, but not where she expected to find it. 

At times humorous and self-deprecating, at times poignant and heartbreaking, this is the story of one woman’s path from abandonment to wholeness and authenticity.