J. Alexander Cohen

I was a love child of the Summer of 1967, born to a hippie mother and a freethinking father, who’d come together to take a very long road trip, and split up once they get back to my biological mother’s home town.

She got pregnant with me. She didn’t want to tie him down. It was the late 1960s, when being a 20-year-old single mother would have been very, very hard for her. Given her situation, my biological mother put me up for adoption.

I was adopted into a loving, upper-middle-class Jewish household. My parents had both come from adversity. Mom was a Holocaust survivor who’d lost most of her family, her home, and her country of origin. Dad’s father had died quite young, and he’d to go to work to help support the family as a teenager, working himself up the corporate ladder.

Each of these three parental figures had a strong influence on my writing. Dad taught me to be a perfectionist, to always keep striving, and to be proud enough of my work to sign my name to it. Mom told me over and over again, “write about the human condition” (thanks, Mom!). I like to think that I got a good dose of writing DNA from my biological mother; before she became disabled from work, she’d been a successful journalist both locally and in Los Angeles.

I always wanted to write. I loved the Peanuts comics where Snoopy would tap out stories on his typewriter, defying physics sitting perched atop his doghouse. From the age of 14 I took writing seriously and spent my evenings on Dad’s Selectric in the basement, followed by my home computer.

I wrote my first good novel, Bear Like Me, in 1999, and it was published in 2003. It took from age 14 to age 31 for my writing to get good enough to be published. From 2003 to 2019, my writing was on hiatus while I was helping Mom out with Dad and his mild cognitive impairment…later, Alzheimer’s.

I’ve been very fortunately that all of my jobs have involved writing in one way or another: legal editor, CD-ROM editor, freelance writer, technical writer, marketing writer, court reporter, blogger and so on. It’s been a checkered career, but all that experience has been great grist for the fiction writing mill.

I started writing seriously again after major surgery in 2020. My first project was a podcast, The Lavender Tavern. You can find out about my other writing work on the rest of this site.

My latest novel, Talio’s Codex, is out now.