Rachel Cohen

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, 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.

Biography Rachel Cohen was born in 1973 and raised in an "academic family" in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she attended high school. In 1993, she originally worked as an AIDS activist while in Paris. She won the 2003 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for her essay series A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. In 2020, she published Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, about Jane Austen. She also "wrote a whole book of essays about Pessoa, Mandelstam and Cavafy that was never published".