Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Washington Heights, New York, Cowen wrote poetry from a young age, influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas.

The two discovered a mutual acquaintance in Carl Solomon, whom they had both met while spending time separately in a mental hospital.

A lifelong depressive, Cowen began to be afflicted by increasingly severe psychological breakdowns, eventually being admitted to Bellevue Hospital in order to obtain treatment for hepatitis and psychosis.

At her parents' home she committed suicide, jumping through the locked living room window and falling seven stories to the ground.

[4] A volume of work from her only surviving notebook, titled Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, edited by Tony Trigilio, was published in 2014 by Ahsahta Press.

A short biography and several of her poems are included in Women of the Beat Generation: Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, edited by Brenda Knight.