Rachel Cohen
American writer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rachel Cohen (born May 19, 1973) is an American essayist and biographer. A 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, she is author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (2004), also published as A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (2024); Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (2013); and Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (2020). She has been on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Chicago.
Rachel Cohen | |
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| Born | May 19, 1973 |
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| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (2014) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
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Biography
Rachel Cohen was born in 1973 and raised in an "academic family" in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she attended high school.[1] She received the James N. Britton volume An Anthology of Verse for Children as a young child.[2] She obtained her BA from Harvard University in 1994.[3] In 1993, she originally worked as an AIDS activist while in Paris.[2]
Cohen was a MacDowell Colony Fellow twice, in 2000 and 2002.[4] She won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for her essay series A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists.[5][6] In 2013, she published Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, a biography of the art historian.[7] In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction.[8] In 2020, she published Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, about Jane Austen.[9] She also "wrote a whole book of essays about Pessoa, Mandelstam and Cavafy that was never published".[2] She is also a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow.[8]
At some point before 2004,[1] Cohen joined the Sarah Lawrence College faculty, specializing in creative writing.[8] In 2016, she began teaching at the University of Chicago, working as a professor of practice.[3] Following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she began using Zoom as a platform for classes with 92nd Street Y.[2]
Cohen has lived in Brooklyn,[1] Cambridge, Massachusetts,[8] and Chicago.[2]