Rachel Cohen

Rachel Cohen has written essays for The New Yorker, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, The Threepenny Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s and other publications, and her essays have been anthologized in Best American Essays and in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her first book, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists is a series of thirty-six linked essays about the encounters among thirty figures in American history during the long century from the civil war through the civil rights movement; it won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and was named a notable book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and by Maureen Corrigan on National Public Radio. Her new book, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, investigates the development of a great art connoisseur who began life as a penniless Lithuanian immigrant and made his career in the world of Gilded Age finance and prejudice. It is due out from the Yale University Press Jewish Lives Series in October of 2013. Cohen is a member of the regular faculty of the creative nonfiction program at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.