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Helen Degen Cohen

From a review by John Guzlowski of Helen Degen Cohen’s collection of poetry Habry:

Helen wrote about her experiences as a child during the war. She was in the Lida Ghetto in Belorus, then in hiding with her parents in the town’s little prison (where her father, a barber and jack-of-all-trades, created a flood only he could fix, in order to show the Gestapo how indispensable he was). Later, separated from her parents, she was in hiding again in a cabin surrounded by the farm fields she grew to love and the flowers that grew alongside them. The flowers were habry, or what we call cornflowers. While she was in hiding, her parents were with the partisans in the resistance, as described in the new movie Defiance.

Helen Degen Cohen’s (aka Halina Degenfisz) awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, First Prize in British Stand Magazine’s International fiction competition, several Illinois Arts Council awards (latest in 2003), an IAC Fellowship, an Indiana Writers Conference Award, and fellowships to the major art colonies. She is a founding and current editor of Rhino and coordinates its adjunct, The Poetry Forum. She was an IAC Artist-In-Education and taught for Roosevelt University. Twice featured in The Spoon River Poetry Review, and in online zines such as TheScreamOnline, her work is the subject of articles such as: “Rootlessness and Alienation in the Poetry of Helen Degen Cohen,” in Shofar (U. of Nebraska Press) and “This Dark Poland–Ethnicity in the work of Helen Degen Cohen” in Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent, Columbia University Press. Two books were released in 2009: Habry, and a chapbook, On A Good Day One Discovers Another Poet. The author served on the editorial board of the new anthology from SUNY, Where We Find Ourselves, Jewish Women Around the World Write About Home — where an excerpt from her autobiographical novel, Mirka and I, appears.