Hava Pinhas Cohen is a poet, lecturer in literature and art, facilitator of poetry and prose writing workshops in Jerusalem. Editor of poetry books and art books. Researching and writing her doctoral thesis at Bar Ilan University as a Presidential grantee since 2012. Founder and editor of the magazine DIMOOY for Jewish literature, art, and culture from 1989.
Founder and artistic director of the “Kissufim” Conference of Jewish writers and poets, which will be held for the fifth time in 2019.
A main topic of Pinhas-Cohen’s research and writing is Jewish literature and the identity of Jewish literature after the Second World War. She has focused particularly on the Ladino culture which flourished for five centuries in various regions of the Balkans after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, only to disappear almost entirely in the Holocaust. Hava Pinhas Cohen travels frequently in the Balkans (Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia and Slovenia) and writes about the region from both Jewish and general cultural perspectives.
Pinhas-Cohen has had, to date, twelve books of poetry published by Am Oved and Hakibbutz-Hameuchad. With the poet Israel Eliraz she co-authored A School of One Man, a book of conversations about poetry and art. Her poems have been translated into English, French, German, Dutch, Bulgarian, Spanish, Chinese, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Turkish, Slovenian, Romanian, and Italian, and have appeared in various anthologies in those languages. A bilingual edition of her poems was published by Amphora in Amsterdam in 2009. A selection of her poems, Bridging the Divide, translated by Sharon Hart-Greene, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2016.Orphea’s Poetry was translated into Macedonian by Elizabeta Sheleva and published by Magor in 2017.
A collection of Pinhas-Cohen’s translations from the English of American poet Robert Pinsky was published by “Kisufim.” The contemporary Slovenian poetry anthology I Am Burning and Cannot Reach the Silence, translated by Pinhas-Cohen in collaboration with the poet Barbara Pogačnik, was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in 2016.
Pinhas-Cohen has won various prizes including the “Hayetsira” prize, the Alterman Prize, ACUM prize for the best book of the year, the Kugel Prize of the Municipality of Holon, the Rishon LezionPrize in the name of Meir Ariel for Hebrew composition, the Ramat GanPrize and more. She received the prize of the Pro Poet festival in Indija Serbia, 2018 and won the prize for “the best lyrics” at the Azem Shkreli Poetry festival in Kosovo, 2019.
