Sage Cohen

Sage Cohen is an American poet, writing teacher, coach, and the author of three Writer's Digest titles on the working life of poets and writers. She is a graduate of Brown University and earned an M.F.A. from the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she was awarded a full fellowship. She has guided what she calls the life poetic for more than two decades and has supported thousands of poets and writers through her coaching, instruction, and online community We Write.

Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writer's Digest, 2009) is the book that established her platform, structured as eighty short chapters covering everything from finding inspiration and developing a daily poetry practice through working with form, reading like a poet, navigating rejection, and getting work into print. The Productive Writer: Tips and Tools to Help You Write More, Stress Less, and Create Success (2010) extends the same approach to the working business of any writing life, with practical systems for setting and meeting goals, carving out writing time alongside work and family, weeding out habits that fight the work, using social media to build an author platform, and creating a sustainable writing rhythm. Fierce on the Page (2016) is her third Writer's Digest title and her most personal, treating the writing life as a practice of courage, presence, and integrity.

Her poetry collection Like the Heart, the World (Queen of Wands Press) draws together more than a decade of her work. She has published more than thirty poems and essays in journals and anthologies including The Sunday Oregonian, Poetry Flash, Oregon Literary Review, VoiceCatcher, Greater Good, and A Cup of Comfort for Writers. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008 and won first prize in the 2006 Ghost Road Press poetry contest.

She teaches the long-running online class Poetry for the People, the Published Poet Accelerator program, and the We Write community for poets and writers. Her monthly Writing the Life Poetic newsletter helps poets develop inspiration, hone craft, and cultivate the writing life. Her articles have appeared in multiple editions of Poet's Market, Writer's Market, the Guide to Self-Publishing, and Writer's Digest magazine. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.