Ruth Ellen Kocher (born July 26, 1965, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) is an American poet.

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Cave Canem.

Her poems have been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r and have appeared or are forthcoming in various anthologies including, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, 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, New Bones: Contemporary Black Writing in America.

Her collaborative scholarly work on Frederick Douglass (Miller, Keith D., and Ruth Ellen Kocher.

[6] She has been awarded fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation,[7] the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and Yaddo.