Ira Cohen Biography

Ira Cohen (February 3, 1935 – April 25, 2011) was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker. Cohen lived in Morocco and in New York City in the 1960s, he was in Kathmandu in the 1970s and traveled the world in the 1980s, before returning to New York, where he spent the rest of his life. Cohen died of renal failure on April 25, 2011. Ira Cohen's literary archive now resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Cohen was born in 1935 in the Bronx, New York City, to deaf parents. Cohen graduated from the Horace Mann School at 16 and attended Cornell, where he took a class taught by Vladimir Nabokov. He dropped out of Cornell, then enrolled at the School of General Studies of Columbia University. Cohen married Arlene Bond, a Barnard student, in 1957. They had two children, David Schleifer and Rafiqa el Shenawi.