Naomi Cohn On Reimagined Lexicons and Writing Forward
Naomi's creative reclamation of life as a disabled person and moving forward as a lifelong creative
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Naomi Cohn is a writer and a teaching artist whose work explores the nuances of reclamation and transformation. Born and raised in Chicago, she has lived an incredibly creative life, which is highlighted by her involvement in a guerrilla feminist art collective and her work as a copy editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Her creative non-fiction and poetry have been published in well-known literary magazines such as the Baltimore Review, Fourth River, Hippocampus, Terrain, and Poetry, and more. She now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Minnesota.
The discussion touches on Naomi’s writing process for her current book, which went through multiple transformations. Originally a collection of prose poetry, the manuscript became an extraordinary hybrid of lyrical essays and prose poetry structured as reimagined encyclopedia entries–an inventive and evocative way of tackling her re-learning of everyday activities as her blindness progressed, especially reading and writing.
Naomi was born sighted and didn’t start losing her vision until the age of thirty when she started experiencing the effects of a retinal condition. This condition damaged her central vision which very slowly and progressively started to affect her ability to function as a sighted person. Naomi describes how she lost one world, the sighted world, but gained a universe.
Listen to Naomi Cohn’s episode to hear more about her creative reclamation of life as a disabled person, and moving forward as a lifelong creative.
Keep up with Naomi:
Read The Braille Encyclopedia here
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