Rachel Cohen is an American essayist and biographer. A 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, she is author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (2004), also published as A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (2024); Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (2013); and Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (2020). She has been on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Chicago.