A poet, creative writer, therapist and thinker
Shari Kocher
Shari Kocher is an Australian poet, fiction-writer, educator and therapist. She holds a BA from Flinders University, an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Melbourne University, specialising in the verse novels of Australian poet, Dorothy Porter, and the writings of Canadian poet and classicist, Anne Carson. Other accreditations include a Diploma in Remedial Massage and a Certificate in AUSLAN. Shari is currently undertaking further developmental training in applying somatic embodiment techniques to creative writing in both generative and therapeutic contexts.
Shari is the author of two poetry collections published by the acclaimed independent Australian press, Puncher & Wattmann: The Non-Sequitur of Snow (2015) and Foxstruck and Other Collisions (2021). The former was shortlisted for the FAW Anne Elder Award (2015) and the latter was Highly Commended at the NSW Premier’s Literature Awards in the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize (2022). Widely anthologized in Australia and elsewhere, including in Best Australian Poems 2021, 2016, 2013, Cordite Poetry Review, Meanjin, Overland, Plumwood Mountain, Southerly and Westerly, among others, Kocher’s work has won or been shortlisted for numerous accolades, including the Peter Steele Poetry Award in 2019 and the University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize in 2016. A further manuscript, Sonqoqui awaits publication.
Her current creative directions include a new poetry collection and a book of short fiction, in tandem. The poetry combines ekphrastic with feminist ecopoetic approaches, while the book of short fiction explores somatic methods in process. While the fiction resulting from this process is unlike anything she has written to date, the methods under consideration ask questions related to how language grows into story in our nervous systems, and how kinaesthetic preverbal and nonverbal awareness might enable access to deeper substrates or kinds of story-making that are mobile, surprising, granular or organically connected to possibilities that pivot between conscious emergence and flow states that enter memory, critical thinking and imagination concurrently while dissolving blocks or trauma triggers., in safe and holistic ways.
Shari lives and writes and rests as a guest on the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung peoples in Central Victoria (Australia) where she pays tribute to past, present and future community and to the ancestors and keepers of Bunjil’s law.
