Biography:
Biographical Narrative
Joann Louise Cohn (b. ca. 1930-) attended high school in Portland, Oregon during the mid to late 1940s. Cohn and Gary Snyder (1930-) became friends in 1946 when they were both teenagers. They sent each other letters and poems when one or the other left Portland for vacation, summer camp, or later college. Cohn graduated from Stanford in 1952. She received a Masters degree in Library Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1955. Cohn married Robert E. Cazden, and the couple and their children lived for many years in Lexington, Kentucky. Robert Cazden was a professor of Library Science at the University of Kentucky.
In 1942, Gary Snyder and his family moved to Portland, Oregon from a small farm near Seattle, Washington. During his high school years, Snyder held a number of part-time jobs including working at a camp on Spirit Lake in Washington and as a copy boy for the Portland Oregonian . He was also an avid mountain climber and hiker. In 1947, Snyder graduated from Lincoln High School and enrolled at Reed College. He graduated from Reed with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Anthropology in 1951. Gary Snyder, influential poet, essayist, translator, Zen Buddhist, environmentalist, lecturer, and teacher, has written more than twenty books of poetry and prose including his forty-year work Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) and Turtle Island for which he won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
From the guide to the Joann Cohn Cazden Collection, 1945-1965, (bulk 1945-1948), (University of California, Davis. General Library. Dept. of Special Collections.)
