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Yael Shoshana Hacohen (also known as Yael S. Hacohen, Hebrew: יעל שושנה הכהן, born Yael Shoshana Geva; May 19,1986) is an Israeli poet, author, and translator.

Early life
Hacohen was born in Tel Aviv, Israel. Hacohen’s maternal grandmother is a fourth generation descendent of Yoel Moshe Salomon, founder of the city Petah Tikva in Ottoman Palestine, and publisher of the Ha-Levanon, the first Hebrew language newspaper printed in Palestine. Hacohen’s great-aunt on her mother’s side, is the Abstract Expressionist painter, Hagit Lalo. Her maternal grandfather is descendant of Yosef Friedman, one of the founding fathers of the city of Rosh Pinna in Palestine. Her paternal grandfather was Brigadier Yosef Geva, who served as Israel’s military attaché in Washington and the Major General of Israel’s Central Command.

She is the eldest daughter of Dan Geva, the senior partner at Meitar Law Offices and Prof. Ronny Geva, who served as chair of the Department of Psychology at Bar Ilan University.

Education
Hacohen attended Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, the country’s first Hebrew high school, where she studied in the Open University classroom, taking courses in psychology. In 2012, She received an LL.B in Law from Tel Aviv University, and an additional B.A degree in Literature. In 2016, she graduated from New York University, GSAS, with an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry. At NYU she was an ‎NYU Veterans Workshop Fellow, International Editor at Washington Square Literary ‎Review, and Editor-in-Chief at Nine Lines Literary Review.

Hacohen is currently studying for a PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career
Hacohen’s work has been featured in The Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, LIT, Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly Magazine, and Consequence Magazine.

‎Hacohen's chapbook Between Sanctity and Sand was published with Finishing Line Press in 2021. In reviewing the book, Yusef Komunyakaa wrote “A quietude lives in Between Sanctity and Sand—through Yael Shoshana Hacohen’s strong voice.” Edward Hirsch, wrote “An heir to Yehuda Amichai, Yael Hacohen is a young poet with an old soul, and her harrowing, war-torn lyrics bring something utterly fresh into American poetry—a shocked memory of military life, a desert consciousness that hovers between the sacred and the profane, and an awe-inspiring sense of poetry that is both ancient and new. This short book is a gem.” Deborah Landau wrote, “What a revelatory and painful pleasure it is to read the fierce lyrics in Yael Hacohen‘s “Between Sanctity and Sand”; this formidable debut packs a punch, conjuring the terrors of war while retaining the tender humanity and intimacies of song.” Craig Morgan Teicher wrote, “Yael S. Hacohen‘s poems conjure, with vivid, soul-piercing immediacy, the view from behind a soldier’s eyes, drawing on her experience as a commander in the Israeli military. In one poem, a young trainee feels the first awesome thrill of a weapon in her hand: “I could shoot like an angel./ I could hit a running target/ at six-hundred-fifty meters.” Terrifying moments are rendered as if in time-lapse photography: “After he shoots, you want to shoot back, but you didn’t/ put in the time. And now you can’t get your breathing straight.” The speaker of one of these poems even grieves her enemy: “Little boy, what could lead you to strap a bomb to your chest?” Hacohen neither shrinks from nor condemns war; she seek to comprehend it, to acknowledge its persistence. “Listen, even the olive tree/ needs to be beaten with a stick,” she advises, which is perhaps to say you can love your enemy and still not have peace.”