Alan J. Cohen

Born in the Bronx, he spent his formative years on Long Island, reading, writing, bicycle riding; trips to the city, days spent at the beaches, sports on the neighborhood streets, three high school letters; band and chorus, math league, summer camps; reading comics, playing Risk and poker and squabbling with friends. Graduated from Vassar College, went to UC Davis Medical School (spent six months in the UK his senior year, in Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London), did his internship in Boston, and his Internal Medicine residency in Hawaii, and began his working life as Medical Director of an inner city clinic in Davenport, IA.

He then was a consultant to a group of Family Practitioners in Amherst; the President of the Executive Committee of the Medical Staff in Chicopee/Springfield, Massachusetts; Assistant Professor at the Yale Health Plan, taking care of students and Yale employees, and their families, and teaching students and residents; Associate Program Director at the VA in Danville and University of Illinois in Champaign, teaching 100 students and residents for a month each during those four years; Chief of Primary Care at the VA in Fresno; Acting Chief of Staff in Marion, IL; and finally Chief of Primary Care at the VA in Roseburg/Eugene, Oregon.

During his medical residency in Honolulu, he and his wife Anita met over the heart monitors, and they have been happily married for 44 years. They opened, owned, and operated The Chocolate Bakery in Northampton, Massachusetts. She had a career as an RN in a variety of venues and roles; and she has been an artist all her life. She has provided the artwork for the covers of both his books.

Since retirement he has been publishing some of the various things he has written over the years. His poetry has appeared in nearly 100 venues; he has had letters to the editor in Poetry magazine and the New Yorker; has published medical articles and essays concerning current affairs. While working in Chicopee, he sponsored a thematic contest for poems addressing nuclear weapons and then published a book of those poems, working with Donald Junkins and Joanne Gates. He is engaged in a variety of active writing projects.