Romanian-American writer Maria-Cristina Necula has been playing with words and sentences since she could talk. She wrote her first poem at eight in her native Bucharest, Romania. After her father’s escape from Romania to New York, she and her mother found solace from the regime’s repercussions at the Bucharest National Opera until the family reunited in the New World. Those magical operatic evenings ignited an instant passion in the ten-year-old, which later drove her to study classical singing in New York, Vienna, and Bucharest, and perform at various venues, culminating with Carnegie Hall. In parallel, Maria-Cristina’s love of writing and languages led to her studying French at Purchase College and the Sorbonne, and her rhymed translation of Molière’s The School For Wives was performed in Canterbury, England. Eventually, writing prevailed. After getting her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center, Maria-Cristina’s dissertation-based book, The Don Carlos Enigma, was published in 2020, followed by her poetry collection Evanescent. Her published work also includes the anthology Life in Opera: Truth, Tempo and Soul and two translations: Europe à la carte and Molière’s The School for Wives. She is a regular contributor to the culture and society website Woman Around Town and Classical Singer Magazine, and her work has been featured, among other publications, in Opera America and Das Opernglas. In 2022, Maria-Cristina was awarded a New York Press Club Award in the Critical Arts Review category for her review of Matthew Aucoin's Eurydice at the Metropolitan Opera, published on Woman Around Town. She was a 2022-24 Fellow of The Writers' Institute at The Graduate Center, where she wrote her recently published memoir The Voice Beneath the Quince Tree.