Ruth Ellen Kocher


Ruth Ellen Kocher is an American poet. She is the recipient of the PEN/Open Book Award, the Dorset Prize, the Green Rose Prize, and the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Cave Canem. She is Professor of English at the University of Colorado - Boulder where and serves as Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences and Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities.

Life

Ruth Ellen Kocher is an American poet and author of Third Voice, Ending in Planes,, Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun, domina Un/blued, One Girl Babylon, When the Moon Knows You're Wandering, 2002 Winner of the Green Rose Prize in Poetry, and Desdemona's Fire winner of the . Her poems have been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r and have appeared or are forthcoming in various anthologies including, , Black Nature, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, An Anthology for Creative Writers: The Garden of Forking Paths, IOU: New Writing On Money, . Her work has been published in numerous journals. Her collaborative scholarly work on Frederick Douglass has become a staple pedagogical text in slave narrative studies.
Her collection, domina Un/blued won the Dorset Prize in 2010 and was published in 2013. Reviewing the collection in Prairie Schooner in 2014, Parneisha Jones, singled out for praise Kocher's creative use of the page design, writing, "The attention to form and placement adds another important layer to the collection."
Kocher earned her B.A. from Pennsylvania State University in 1990, her MFA from Arizona State University in 1994, and her Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 1999. She has taught at Missouri Western State College, Southern Illinois University and the University of Missouri.
Her career has divided between scholarly research and her work as a poet. Kocher feels that each activity informs and enriches the other. She has been awarded fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and Yaddo. She has taught for the University of Missouri, Southern Illinois University, the New England College Low Residency MFA program, the Indiana Summer Writer's workshop, and Washington University's Summer Writing program.
She professor of English literature in the Department of English at the University of Colorado-Boulder and where she also serves as Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities.

Awards

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