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CU-Boulder Professor Ruth Ellen Kocher always wanted to write, and adversity only cemented the award-winning poet’s resolve

Today, University of Colorado Boulder English professor Ruth Ellen Kocher is a celebrated poet and professor, but she didn’t get to this point before clearing several obstacles. As a girl keenly interested in reading, but with few resources available to her, she devoured castaway library books. She mimicked the textbook format in her first stories, complete with Q&A sections.

A first-generation college student who grew up in a housing project, she earned a B.A. from The Pennsylvania State University, and an M.F.A. and from Ph.D. from Arizona State University. She despises the notion that students from state universities receive anything other than a first-rate education and has elected to teach specifically at public institutions.

She battled and survived cancer—twice—by the time she was 21. Confronting her own mortality cemented two convictions in her: She wanted to teach, and she wanted to write.

As one of the University of Colorado Boulder’s first black women to hold the rank of full professor, she has done both. Her prowess as a poet has been recognized with numerous awards. This summer, she was honored with the PEN/American Open Book Award for her poetry collection, “domina/Unblued” (Tupelo Press, 2013).

Her life narrative is as compelling as her poetry.

Kocher grew up in the small coal-mining city of Wilkes-Barre, Penn. Her maternal great-grandfather emigrated with his family from Calabria, Italy, as an indentured servant to the railroads around the turn of the 20th century. At this time, the area was experiencing a great influx of people seeking jobs in the coal-mining-related industries. She has recently discovered that her father’s family, estranged by distance, was composed of musicians, artists and teachers.

Kocher describes the post-industrial town she was born into as “a place consumed and used up” by industry. The declining economy, caused by a collapse of coal mining, produced populations of people removed from their cultural identities, who lacked direction or hope for the future, she says.

In this bleak environment, Kocher found an identity as a poet and scholar.

Growing up underprivileged in a HUD project along the Susquehanna River, Kocher occupied herself with reading and writing. She remembers being drawn to poetry at a young age and would often pen verses for her friends.

Kocher also attributes her fondness for poetry to after-school religious instructions to which her mother sent her. “I remember sitting in church and memorizing the Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms and repeating them over and over — these incantations were revelries of sound. I think that’s the first poetry that I really heard and memorized.”

“Books were something of a luxury,” Kocher remembers. The only municipal library was very far from her home. But thanks to an uncle who worked at the Salvation Army, the budding poet-scholar got old textbooks and comic books for which libraries had no use.

Severe asthma and childhood illness meant that she spent many days indoors poring over textbooks and imitating their style. She notes that it was a while before she realized that not all storybooks had questions at the end of the chapters.

An epiphany at Penn State

Kocher attended Pennsylvania State University, where she studied English literature and creative writing. Her family had little money, and her parents were struggling to raise three other children at home. Kocher funded her own college education with scholarships, grants, loans and “many, many” jobs.

Kocher does not recall a singular moment when she realized she would devote her life to the study of writing: “A lot of writers have that moment, that epiphany, but I can say without question that I have no memory at all of wanting anything other than to be a writer.”

She did doubt whether she would be able to support herself as a writer and considered pursuing more practical avenues such as journalism and editing.

Her second cancer diagnosis interrupted her studies at Penn State and awakened a sense of urgency in Kocher. Her first diagnosis had come at the age of 15.

She realized that to be a writer, she needed to get things written, to share them through publication, and to study the work of great writers. She directed her attention to poetry.

After taking time off from school to recover from her illness, Kocher began to sit in on a few classes at Penn State as she saved money to go back to school. One of these classes brought her in contact with Bruce Weigl, a Penn State professor, poet and Vietnam-era veteran, who had a tremendous impact on Kocher.

“If it weren’t for him, I’m not sure I wouldn’t be here,” she says of Weigl. “It was my greatest lesson of how important mentorship is, especially for college students.”

With Weigl’s help, Kocher secured a scholarship and re-enrolled in classes at Penn State. He instilled in her a confidence that she could succeed in academia, despite her background. Eventually, Weigl steered her toward the M.F.A. program at Arizona State University, where she enrolled after graduating from Penn State in 1990.

“I found my hive,” says Kocher of her transition to Arizona State. “It was so exciting to be able to sit down with someone who was also interested in talking about things like what Gertrude Stein was doing with prepositions. I found the practice of writing so exhilarating that I was inspired to pursue scholarly studies and so decided to also pursue a doctoral degree in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.”

And it was about this time that Kocher really started to hit her stride and make good on the promise she made to herself while overcoming cancer. After years dedicated to earning her M.F.A. in Poetry and Poetics, and five subsequent years studying toward her Ph.D, in the span of a month she published her first book of poetry, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation and received her first job offer.

As a “spiritual repayment” to her former mentor, Bruce Weigl, Kocher strove to use her career in higher education to reach out to disadvantaged or overwhelmed students.

“I always think of Bruce as the person who saved me, and I think of myself as a professor who pays him back by trying to find the students who need my help.”

So instead of accepting a job offer as a visiting professor at Smith College, an elite, private institution, the young scholar went to Missouri Western State University, a relatively unknown school “in the middle of nowhere” — a place where the student body was almost exclusively first-generation college students. She was the only black professor on campus.

Although she spent just one year teaching there, Kocher regards her time spent at Missouri Western as time that may have had the greatest impact on students of her career.

Kocher continued teaching and mentoring first- and second-generation college students with high minority enrollment at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. With her empathy for their socioeconomic circumstances, Kocher was able to connect with students who perhaps felt at odds with the university setting and often felt as though they didn’t belong.

New role at CU-Boulder

Now, at CU-Boulder, Kocher feels her role as mentor has changed. At a university with a smaller percentage of minority students, where Kocher is one of the very first black female full professors, she finds herself teaching a less-marginalized demographic of college student.

“My role and my impact became very different at CU because I didn’t have that large body of students of color that needed my mentorship and influence. Here, I found my impact had more to do with standing in front of a generally all-white classroom of students who had perhaps never had a teacher or professor of color before and dispelling some of the stereotypes and misgivings they might harbor toward marginalized peoples. I work them. I provide an atmosphere of rigor that challenges their preconceived notion of who they think I might be and hope that they go forth into the world with a less narrow vision of people who may be unlike them.”

Kocher thrives on such change. In addition to her most recently published poetry collections, “domina Un/blued and Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans & Lovely Gun,” she has an upcoming collection of long-line experimental poems, titled “Ending in Planes,” due out in November. Additionally, Kocher has begun dabbling in different media to achieve a style of poetry both “on and off the page.”

Kocher is interested in working with modern modes of composition in order to investigate what it means to be a poet in the new millennium. In addition to a few short digital films, which she describes as “a mixture of poetry, art and sound,” she has produced an art book in collaboration with the Chicago paper artist Krista Franklin, which was on exhibit at Pace University Library early last year.

When looking toward the future, Kocher seems confident that her writing will continue to evolve with budding new forms and various uses of media: “There are all kinds of ways that literature, and writing, and the work that we do, finds new life. The generation of students I teach now will determine what those new lives are to be.”

In between writing poetry and essays on literature and writing, and helping her English students figure out what writing futures might hold, Kocher is trying to take time to enjoy the rewards of a lifetime of hard work and dedication to a craft.

“One of the things I’ve decided to do at this point in my career is celebrate the work. When I was younger, it was all business and obligation. In this stage of my work, I am more careful to celebrate my small successes, to enjoy this privileged life of working at what I love to do. I don’t want to think back about my work and only remember a series of deadlines,” says Kocher.

Given her dramatic rise out of poverty, dual victories over cancer, inspiring work as a professor and mentor to marginalized students, and award-winning volumes of poetry, one might justifiably say she’s earned the right to celebrate.

Robert Stein is a CU-Boulder senior majoring in English and an intern for Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine.