Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. She created the We the Poets program for children from diverse cultural and faith communities (www.theartwell.org) and has taught students and educators in the USA and Israel. She teaches poetry and painting to adults through local venues, including Ritualwell (Reconstructing Judaism), Or Zarua, and Kol Tzedek. Her poems appear in literary journals and four collections: Camera Obscura (2017, Moonstone Press), Etching the Ghost (2021, Atmosphere Press) and Sparks and Disperses (2021, Cornerstone Press) and Murmurations (2024, Moonstone Press). Two of her poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her artwork is available through Cerulean Arts Gallery.

Cathleen Cohen’s poetry speaks to the holiness in the act of creating. Loss and longing are also part of the landscapes she paints with her words–she embraces the complexities in her roles as artist, teacher, friend, mother, grandmother, sister of a dying brother. All of these experiences are cast in a deep appreciation for being, for life itself, for the possibility of color, for springtime flowers coming to life during the winter of our souls. – Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer, Author and Editor, Director of Programming at Ritualwell.

Murmurations are poems of light and color and openness underlaid by gray rolling in or darkness waiting to take hold, poems created as layer upon layer of precise and exquisite images that expose long-hidden terrors – as women’s poems so often do. In these poems we meet the painter’s ever-moving eye and the painter’s fluttering hands, in work that is not ekphrastic, but epiphanic – not poems exploring a work of art, but poems that open up for us the process of art.   –  Elliott batTzedek, poet & translator