(This portrait of New York's Lexington School for the Deaf...)
This portrait of New York's Lexington School for the Deaf is not just a work of journalism. It is also a memoir since Leah Hager Cohen grew up on the school's campus and her father is its superintendent. As a hearing person raised among the deaf, Cohen appreciates both the intimate textures of that silent world and the gulf that separates it from our own.
(The chronicles of summer in the lives of two sisters who ...)
The chronicles of summer in the lives of two sisters who had lost their parents in a boating accident as babies reveal how they trace the unraveling of the mythology that the two girls have created to explain their parents' death.
Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things
(Once upon a time, we knew the origins of things: what pie...)
Once upon a time, we knew the origins of things: what piece of earth the potato on our dinner plate came from, which well our water was dipped from, who cobbled our shoes, and whose cow provided the leather. In many parts of the world, that information is still readily available. But in our society, even as technology makes certain kinds of information more accessible than ever, other connections are irrevocably lost. In Glass, Paper, Beans, Leah Cohen traces three simple commodities on their geographic and semantic journey from her rickety table in the Someday Café to their various points of origin.
The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater
(In this unique theatrical memoir, novelist Cohen chronicl...)
In this unique theatrical memoir, novelist Cohen chronicles the ups and downs of her suburban community theater's struggles over the staging of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. The project is fraught with problems, the Arlington, Massachusetts, theater, and its conservative supporters are reluctant to stage a play that deals daringly with sexuality and race; meanwhile, it proves quite difficult to find an Asian man to play the transgendered lead (who also has a nude scene) but the show must and does go on.
(I. J. Esker spends her days teaching math at a private sc...)
I. J. Esker spends her days teaching math at a private school in Brooklyn; most nights she curls up under an afghan in her tiny apartment and reads. At thirty-one, after early loss and disappointment, Esker has found a quiet resolve in her self-imposed solitude. But when Ann James, one of her favorite students, mysteriously falls from the bleachers during Winter Concert rehearsals and has to stay home in casts during the weeks before Christmas, Esker begins home-tutoring the precocious teenager, and soon, much to her chagrin, finds herself falling edgily, haltingly in love with the girl's father, Wally.
Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight
(In the fall of 2001, Cohen met up with four girls, ages t...)
In the fall of 2001, Cohen met up with four girls, ages ten to fifteen, and their female coach at the Somerville Boxing Club. Over the course of a year, she grew close to them all–spending time at the old-style boxing club where they trained several times a week and at their homes, schools, and neighborhood hangouts. She learned about their families, the housing projects where they lived, their explosive friendships and steadfast loyalties, and especially about the damage that had turned each of them into a fighter.
(Late in her twentieth year, Beatrice mails a letter on th...)
Late in her twentieth year, Beatrice mails a letter on the fly, sparking events that will change her life forever. The addressee is her grandmother, a legendary stage actress long estranged from her daughter, Bea's mother. Though Bea wants to become an actress herself, it is the desire to understand the old family rift that drives her to work her way into her grandmother's graces.
(The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just...)
The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. Struggling to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and for their two older children, they find themselves pretending not only that little has changed, but also that their marriage, their family, have always been intact. Yet in the aftermath of the baby's death, long-suppressed uncertainties about John and Ricky's relationship come roiling to the surface. A dreadful secret emerges with reverberations that reach far into their past and threaten their future.
(Too often, we fear that uttering those three little words...)
Too often, we fear that uttering those three little words will diminish us, somehow undermine our status and block our advancement. In fact, though, as Leah Hager Cohen argues, these words liberate and empower. So much of the condition of being human involves not knowing. The more comfortable we become with this truth, the more fully and unabashedly we may inhabit our skins, our souls, and the abler we are to grow.
(At the edge of a woods, on the grounds of a defunct “free...)
At the edge of a woods, on the grounds of a defunct “free school,” Ava and her brother, Fred, shared a dreamy and seemingly idyllic childhood - a world defined largely by their imaginations and each other’s presence. Everyone is aware of Fred’s oddness or vague impairment, but his parents’ fierce disapproval of labels keeps him free of evaluation or intervention, and constantly at Ava’s side.
(A novel about what happens when an already sprawling fami...)
A novel about what happens when an already sprawling family hosts an even larger and more chaotic wedding: an entertaining story about family, culture, memory, and community. In the seemingly idyllic town of Rundle Junction, Bennie and Walter are preparing to host the wedding of their eldest daughter Clem. A marriage ceremony at their beloved, rambling home should be the happiest of occasions, but Walter and Bennie have a secret.
Leah Hager Cohen is an American writer who writes both fiction and nonfiction. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review as well.
Background
Leah Hager Cohen was born in 1967 in Manhattan, New York. Then the family raised in Queens and later in Nyack, New York, where she spent a large part of her childhood. Her father is Oscar Cohen, a superintendent at the school for the deaf, her mother who died in 2012 was a doula. Cohen grew up with a white biological sister and an African-American adopted brother. Her great-grandmother, Pearl, immigrated to America from Bukovina and threw herself from the window of a mental hospital when Cohen's grandmother was still a young girl.
Education
Leah Hager Cohen became fluent in sign language at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens where her father worked. She entered New York University at sixteen, intending to study drama, but later transferred to Hampshire College to study literature. She was graduating in 1988 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1991 she received A Master of Arts degree at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In her master's thesis, she reported on deaf culture.
Before entering Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Leah Hager Cohen worked as a sign language interpreter for two years.
As she was starting her first book Train Go Sorry in the early 1990s, she moved to Somerville thinking Boston would be a good place for one interested in writing and the arts. The book which grew out of her master’s thesis was published in 1994. It explores the experiences of the deaf, and Cohen’s own childhood, in a New York school for the deaf.
In time, The Karpfinger Agency began representing Cohen’s fiction, and her first novel, Heat Lightning, was published in 1997. The second, in 2003, was Heart, You Bully, You Punk. Her notable work The Grief of Others was adapted into a film with the same name. It was represented at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Inspired by her own experience with loss, Cohen demonstrates in this book a masterful command of storytelling, instilling a melancholy power and grace in her words and driving an already gripping narrative with a quiet but brutal intensity.
Leah Hager Cohen's last book currently is Strangers and Cousins in which Leah Hager Cohen delivers a story of pageantry and performance, a meditation on hopefulness and growth, and a winsome, unforgettable cast of characters whose lives are forever changed by events that unfold and reverberate across generations.
Cohen also was an educator at Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts. She holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.
Leah Hager Cohen's The Grief of Others was longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Train Go Sorry was named one of the best books of 1994 by the American Library Association and is a four-time recipient of the New York Times Notable Book citation.
(I. J. Esker spends her days teaching math at a private sc...)
2003
Views
Leah Hager Cohen notes Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, as the last great book she has read, calling it a “generous, unsettling, chimerical work.” Cohen is not as generous with The Da Vinci Code, saying that although she typically has a kind of “allergic reaction to water-cooler books,” this one somehow managed to slide past her “fortifications,” sucking her in, but in the end, leaving her irritated at how “unbelievably bad” it was. Cohen also shares some of her literary heroes, like Iona Opie and Peter Schumann, as well as literary oversights, like Milton and Conrad.
The biggest non-literary artistic inspiration for her is Joseph Cornell.
Quotations:
"There has been no period in my life when I didn’t guzzle books."
"I write on an old wooden drafting table that belonged to my grandfather. It’s covered with a woven cloth my friend brought back from Estonia, and I keep cups of pens and pencils on it, and a box of needles and thread, and some scrap paper and my computer. I love my workspace, although it’s not entirely what one might think of as conducive to concentration."
"The effort to connect with one another despite certain failure is precisely the movement that brings us closer to our own humanity, and to grace."
"The ability to know one’s limitations, to recognize the bounds of one’s own comprehension—this is a kind of knowing that approaches wisdom."
"People cheat when they are afraid. When there is no cost to being wrong or confessing ignorance, there is no reason to cheat or fake comprehension."
"Every sad thing, every loss or hurt really a challenge to love that much more, really just another of beauty's many strongholds."
"Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer."
Personality
Leah Hager Cohen is intensely curious about the world and especially gifted at finding small, ornate microcosms that show us how people view their own humanity.
She loves water, in the morning she immerses herself in hot running water, so she tends to shower herself into the day, and then she walks the dog, and then come back home for the little scramble of everyone getting out the door, and then if she is lucky, she begins to write. With an apple and coffee.
Her distinctive habits are moving her lips and whispering under her breath while she works.
Her personal favorite places in Manhattan are Washington Square Park, Chinatown, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the West Village, the basketball courts at Sixth Ave and West Third.
Quotes from others about the person
"Cohen's acumen in focusing on these specific people makes her journey and ours particularly pleasurable; she signals connections among commodities and geography and time, supply and demand, raw materials and market forces."
“Cohen's sensuous language bursts with charged imagery, as do her descriptions of a rural hamlet whose apparent summertime languor hides simmering emotions."
Interests
reading, cooking
Connections
When Cohen was 27, she got married. They had three children. The marriage ended when the youngest child was about a year old.
Now she lives with her children and a boyfriend in Belmont, Massachusetts.
