Elise Nada Cowen (July 31, 1933 – February 27, 1962, Washington Heights, Manhattan) was an American poet. She was part of the Beat generation, and was close to Allen Ginsberg, one of the movement's leading figures.

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. She checked herself out against doctors' orders and returned to her parents' apartment on Bennett Avenue under the guise that she was going to go on vacation with her parents to Miami Beach. At her parents' home she committed suicide, jumping through the locked living room window and falling seven stories to the ground.