Leah Hager Cohen
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Leah Hager Cohen is an American author who writes both fiction and nonfiction.
Cohen's father was superintendent of the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, New York, and she became fluent in sign language there. She entered NYU at age 16, intending to study drama, but later transferred to Hampshire College to study literature, graduating in 1988. After working as a sign language interpreter for two years, she entered Columbia Journalism School, graduating in 1991. Deciding she had no interest in being a reporter, she intended to write fiction on the side. An offer from a New York literary agent to publish her nonfiction, but not her short stories, changed her mind.
She is probably best known for her debut work, Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World (1994), which in part related her own experiences growing up at her father's school. Her other works of nonfiction include Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things, in which she reports on the production of those items from various locations, The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Curtain of an American Community Theater, and Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight, on female boxers.
She has also written three novels, including House Lights, and is currently working on a fourth.
Cohen lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.
