Gailcohen
Gail Cohen was born in New York City during the Chinese Year of the Horse. She attended New York and Miami, Florida public schools. Cohen earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in liberal arts, sociology, anthropology and graphic design from Miami-Dade Community College (FL), College of DuPage (IL), Florida International University and the University of Georgia.
Cohen taught junior high school social studies in Miami (FL) and produced public affairs programming for WICD-TV (an NBC-TV affiliate), Champaign, Illinois, before discovering the giftware industry as a marketer, writer and designer in 1980.
During the next decade, she co-owned a photography studio, wrote feature articles for consumer and trade publications and covered local news for The Daily Herald, Illinois’ third largest newspaper. She has scripted and produced commercial videos, researched and written scripts for multi-media software developers and authored Chicago-area TV commercials.
Cohen revolutionized the Judaica market by designing Menorables™, contemporary Chanukah menorahs for kids in 1991. One of her Menorables was featured on CNN-TV’s Worldwide News. Sold by leading department, gift and direct response companies throughout the U.S., the Menorables line led to other licensing opportunities and expanded to 17 designs as of the 2009 holiday season. Her menorahs reside in the collections of Steven Spielberg, k.d. lang, Mandy Patinkin and other prominent Jewish figures.
In 1993, Roman, Inc. published Cohen’s first children’s book, Once Upon an Ark. Over the next several years, she wrote for the Christian and collectibles markets and collaborated on numerous inspirational gift books produced by Publications International of Lincolnwood (IL). Her works of humor, non-fiction and book reviews appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Northshore magazine and R.R. Bowker’s Library Journal. Cohen authored two weekly columns and personality profiles for the Daily Herald until the end of 2003.
Cohen returned to education as an adjunct professor in 1993. Until she retired from teaching in 2007, she taught advertising theory, copywriting and design, public relations theory and design, graphics design communications, magazine writing and design, fundamentals of journalism, editing, technical writing and feature writing to students at Harper Community College (Palatine, IL), and National-Louis University’s Wheaton, Chicago, Wheeling and Evanston (IL) campuses. Sew News published her study on the relationship between aging and creativity in 2007.
Cohen wrote over 2,000 articles for Demand Studios since 2008. Find her work on eHow.com, Tyra Banks’ site typeF.com, Chron.com and USATravel.com sites. A member of Suburban Write People, she co-wrote a collection of short stories called Save the Last Stall for Me -- published in December 2009 – and contributed to Heavy Petting, an ebook published by Musa Publications in 2011. Her first romantic novel, The Christmas Quilt, debuted in December 2011 and was published by Melange Books.
