Ruth Ellen Kocher

Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of godhouse (Omnidawn Press, 2023); Third Voice (Tupelo Press 2016); the 2013 Noemi Book Prize selection Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014); Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014); domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013), winner of the Dorset Prize and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award; One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003); When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2002), selected for the Green Rose Prize; and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), a Naomi Long Madgett Prize selection. Her poems appear or will appear in many anthologies, including Best American Experimental Writing, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets, Black Nature, From the Fishouse, An Anthology for Creative Writers: The Garden of Forking Paths, IOU: New Writing On Money, and New Bones: Contemporary Black Writing in America.

Kocher has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, and Yaddo. She is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers magazine and serves on the Board of Directors for RASA: Race, Solidarity, and the Arts. She has taught poetry writing at 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 currently teaches poetry, poetics, and literature at the University of Colorado-Boulder.