About

Leah Hager Cohen was born in Manhattan and raised at Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens (where her parents worked) and later in Nyack, New York. As a kid, she spent summers at Camp Kinderland, stiltdanced with the Bread and Puppet Theater, ran a follow spot at Elmwood Playhouse, and shelved books at Nyack Library. At age 16, Leah enrolled as a drama student at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, then transferred to Hampshire College a year later to study writing. She joined an arts brigade in Nicaragua, worked as a nanny in Berkeley, rode a Greyhound bus across the country, and freelanced as an ASL interpreter in NYC before attending Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The best praise she ever received came in a letter of recommendation by Edmund W. Gordon, her first boss after college: “She is impatient with institutional stupidity.” Her favorite quote about writing comes from the poet Joseph O. Legaspi: “My first memory of poetry was watching the rain on my windowsill when I was young, and touching the windowpane.” Leah is the author of 7 novels, 5 nonfiction books, one pamphlet, and the blog Love As A Found Object, as well as various and sundry essays, articles and reviews. As of September 2025, she has gone back to school, enrolled in the Master of Social Work program at Simmons University.

© John Earle

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