Nan Cohen
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Nan Cohen is the author of two poetry collections, Rope Bridge (Cherry Grove Collections) and Unfinished City, winner of the Michael Dryden Award from Gunpowder Press and finalist for the Koret Award for an Emerging Writer on Jewish Themes, and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words (Glass Lyre Press). Raised in Baltimore, she attended Yale University and moved to California to attend graduate school in English at UCLA. Awards for her work include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Her poems and prose have appeared in The Arkansas International, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Commuter, The Cortland Review, The Curator, DMQ Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Jews., Journal of the American Medical Association, The Los Angeles Review, The New Republic, The Night Heron Barks, Pilgrimage, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Poetry International, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review, RHINO, ROOM: A Journal of Analytic Action, Slate, SWWIM Every Day, Tikkun, and Western Humanities Review, among others. An essay on Bambi as a parable for European antisemitism appeared in Electric Literature.
Nan was the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, Antioch University Los Angeles, Stanford University, UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, the University of Arkansas in Monticello, and the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop, and she is currently chair of English at an independent school in Los Angeles. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ragdale Foundation, and Write On, Door County. Nan has served since 2002 as poetry program director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, a summer conference for poets, fiction writers, and translators in northern California. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
Published Works
Thousand-Year-Old Words (chapbook, Glass Lyre Press, 2021)
Unfinished City (Gunpowder Press, 2017)
Rope Bridge (Cherry Grove Collections, 2005)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
Yale University
UCLA
Stanford University