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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helen Degen Cohen was born Halina Degenfisz in a small town near Warsaw. When the Germans invaded, the family fled to Lida, White Russia, but were eventually incarcerated in the Lida Ghetto by the advancing Germans. Because the Ghetto population was shrinking due to the Selections (people being marched into a field, weeded out and shot), Helen's father found a way of getting the family out of the Ghetto, to live in semi-hiding in the little prison where he worked. When finally all remaining Jews in Lida were to be exported, and the family stood at the train station waiting to board, her mother gave Helen a cup and told her to pretend to be going for water at a pump, and to keep on walking – until she found the house of the prison cook. The cook in turn found a devout Catholic, who hid Helen in a cabin in the farm country. Meanwhile, Helen's parents were forced onto the train with the rest, and later jumped from the train and joined the Partisans (aka the Resistance, or the Underground). They found Helen after the war, eventually made it to a Displaced Persons Camp in West Germany, and later emigrated to the U.S. Since then, the author has lived and raised a family in the Chicago area.

Helen Degen Cohen is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, an Indiana Writers' Conference Award in Poetry, First Prize in British Stand Magazine's International Short Story Competition, three Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for fiction and poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Her work is the subject of scholarly essays, including: "Rootlessness and Alienation in the Poetry of Helen Degen Cohen", by Miriam Dean-Notting (Kenyon College), in Shofar (University of Nebraska Press) and "This Dark Poland – Ethnicity in the work of Helen Degen Cohen", by John Guzlowski, in Something of My Very Own To Say: American Woman Writers of Polish Descent (Columbia University Press). She has received fellowships to majors arts colonies in the U.S., including Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center For Creative Arts, and Ragdale. She was the featured poet twice in the Spoon River Poetry Review.

The author has two bodies of work, one about the war and the other about everything else. Seven sections of her autobiographical novel, The Edge of the Field, have been published to date, the latest in 2009 in "Where We Find Ourselves", an anthology by SUNY. One section received first prize in Stand Magazine's International Competition (England), and another received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. The chapbook "On A Good Day One Discovers Another Poet" (2009), falls into the everything else category, and is part of a large collection entitled The Book of (night) Writing. Ms Cohen publishes widely in literary journals such as The Partisan Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Minnesota Review, Cream City, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Versal (Holland), Stand Magazine (England), The Antigonish Review (Canda), Akcent (Poland), and Nimrod (forthcoming in 2009). She is working on a backlog of manuscripts, including much poetry, short and long fiction, essays, and work for theater and children.

Helen Degen Cohen has traveled statewide as an Artist-In-Education through the Illinois Arts Council, and taught at Roosevelt University. She is a founding and current editor of the poetry journal, Rhino, and coordinates its popular adjunct workshop, The Poetry Forum. Her many loves include painting, the rumba, movies, gardening, the jitterbug, designing book covers, folk dancing, walking in the woods, the New York City Ballet, raspberries, and habry, the blue cornflowers that grew along the edges of wheat fields.



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