Leah Kogen Elimeliah

Leah Kogen-Elimeliah is a poet, essayist, short story, and nonfiction writer from Moscow, currently living in New York. She earned her MFA from City College of New York where she is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department. Founder and Director of WordShedNYC Reading Series and an Editorial Associate for Fiction literary magazine. Leah has collaborated on various poetry/visual/dance projects with independent artists, experimenting with cross genres, multimedia, and poetry. She's read her work on The Red Stage organized by Creative Time, The NYC Poetry Festival, The Higher Ground Arts Festival, and was selected as a Public Humanities/Arts Graduate Fellow for the Zip Code Memory Project supported by Columbia, CCNY, NYU, Yale and the Social Science & Humanities Research Council. She is a mentor with Girls Write Now, a nationally award winning leader in arts education writing and mentoring organization. Her writing focuses on identity, language, immigration, intergenerational trauma, sexuality, and culture. Leah lives in Nyack, NY with her husband and their children.

6 Articles Published | Follow:
4
There Is No End to Gloria Deitcher

“You need space in your head to be creative, and you need to float.”

9
Rachel Wyman’s Meditative Return to Her Most Natural State

Dancing in the fields of Walla Walla and in the rooms of a Brooklyn psychiatric ward forces Rachel Wyman to reconsider a traditional path to dance movement therapy and inspires her new paintings, “Blue Pajamas.”

Yuge Zhou’s New Video Installation Is a Provocative Ride Through Chinese American History

Project Unity: Ten Miles of Track in One Day memorializes 20,000 Chinese emigrants employed by Central Pacific Railroad to build the transcontinental railroad.

18
Fred Hatt’s Triumphant Portraits Bring a Fresh Perspective on the Human Body

“We can only experience the world in the form of a body that is inherently temporary”: The artist talks about the human form, drawing people, and why he takes such a multidisciplinary approach.

Gothic poem about life and death by New York poet and essayist Leah Elimeliah.
Fixated

I get all tangled up in your wires, mama
my dream had me on my knees
there are witnesses, they don’t howl
at night they don’t bark
their orders are written up
on a white board against black
hollowness inside your curved body.

Ink wash by Nikita Gurnani
Airless

you photographed me
exposed, image of your arm
outstretched clenching my neck
squeezing cluster of wind where life
temporarily nestled