Ruth Twichell Cochrane was born on Oct. 25, 1925, in Tacoma, Wash., the third daughter of Frances and Heath Twichell. Her father, a West Point-trained Army engineer, was then stationed at nearby Fort Lewis.

As an “Army brat,” Ruth moved many times as she grew up. When she was not yet two, she and her mother and two older sisters accompanied her father to Panama, where the family lived for the next three years while he helped maintain the Panama Canal. In 2001, Ruth wrote about these years in her series called The Panama Poems, which was published in 2002 in the Journal of New Jersey Poets. She often wrote poems that revisited memorable periods of her life.

When Ruth was a teenager, her father settled his family, now including a younger brother, in State College, Pa., for the duration of World War II. While their father was overseas, Ruth and her sisters attended and graduated from Penn State. There she met and married her husband, Robert Kennedy Cochrane, the father of her three children, David, Ann and Christopher. In 1946, as newlyweds, they settled in Pittsburgh, Robert’s hometown. From there they moved to Levittown, N.Y., and finally to Chatham, N.J., where the children did most of their growing up.

In 1966, what had become a difficult marriage for Ruth ended in divorce. Needing to go back to work, her first jobs were as a writer for one newspaper and assistant editor for another.

Ruth soon turned to teaching English, first at a parochial school, where students from her writing class enjoyed coming to her home, which she opened up as a kind of intellectual salon. Then she decided to go back to school to become certified in order to teach in the public school system. Soon after, she took a job at Plainfield High School, a 45-minute commute from Chatham. She taught English at Plainfield for the next 30 years until her retirement in the early 1990s.

In her first year at Plainfield, she was also required to teach an elective course on the subject of film. On the first day of the class, the textbooks hadn’t arrived and she had 50 kids in front of her. So she came up with the inspired idea of asking the students if they would like to make a film. Because one of their fellow students had just died from a heroin overdose, her class decided they would make a movie about drugs in the school. They spent the rest of the year writing, shooting and editing the film — which subsequently went on to win a state prize.

At Plainfield Ruth also created a writing program for teen mothers, which enabled them to write about their experiences and to make books for their babies. Ruth was a great teacher, the favorite of many of her students over her long and creative tenure at Plainfield.

Nor as a single, working mother did she ever neglect her own kids. She sold her house in Chatham to finance Ann’s college education, and moved mountains to get Christopher into a good private school when he was a troubled teen. Ann recalls that this was an important time in Ruth’s life, when she was coming into her own as a person and finding her voice as a teacher and a writer.

By the early 1980s, Ruth found the time to get a master’s degree in media from the New School in Manhattan, knowing the extra degree would win her salary and pension gains, although driving to and from the city really lengthened her commute. But she always made the best of things, so she would often rendezvous with Christopher in Manhattan as he finished up his day as a bicycle messenger.

Sometime in the late 1960s, Ruth heard about Martha’s Vineyard. In the summer of 1969, waiting for hours in the standby line in Woods Hole, Volkswagen Bug bulging with kids and all their stuff, she heard her 16-year-old Annie say, “This better be good, mother!” And in fact it was good — very good for Ruth. It was her place. After so many years of struggle and dedication to overcoming obstacles, here she could create herself, she could create her place, and she could become a part of it all.

Initially, Ruth rented a place on the Vineyard every summer for one or two — and occasionally — four weeks. She stayed in many places and made friends with many people: Marguerite Miller, Jack and Jan Daggett, whose cottage at Cedar Tree Neck she rented for a dozen or so years, Lucille Richards, Dionis Coffin Riggs and Cynthia Riggs at the Cleaveland House and the talented poets who met under that roof over the years — George Mills, Russ Hoxsie, Judith Neeld, Jane Brown and many others.

In 1992, when Ruth retired, she had scrimped and saved enough to buy a lot in foreclosure on Moonstone Way in Vineyard Haven. David helped her design and build the home of her dreams. Finally a full-time resident on her beloved Island, she threw herself into all the things she loved to do: gardening, sailing her Sunfish (having taught her kids to sail as well), walking down to Lake Tashmoo every day just to observe, swimming at Katama and State Beach and, later, at Bend in the Road Beach — and always walking there. She became active in the Wednesday’s Poets Workshop and for 10 years she taught kids at the Edgartown School how to read in the America Reads Program. She also wrote and published books. The first one, Reflections on Tashmoo, came out in 1994, two years after she moved here. It has beautiful drawings by Marguerite Miller, who also did the illustrations for her next book, Sandals Waiting, a children’s story published in 2005.

A photograph Ruth kept on her bedside table was from a book signing in Edgartown, where she is surrounded by her literary fellows. Her early poetry won the William Carlos Williams Award; more recently she has been published in the Journal of New Jersey Poets and — many times over the years — by the Vineyard Gazette. Ruth wanted the Wednesday’s Poets to make a book, and so they have — with her picture on the dust jacket and a dedication to her inside, along with a selection of her most recent poems.

In 2008, it became clear that Ruth could no longer live at home, and so she moved to the North Shore to be near David, and then in February of 2009 to New York city to be near Christopher, which is where she died last Dec. 12.

She is survived by her three children, David, Ann and Christopher; two grandsons, Killian and August Cochrane; and her younger brother, Heath Twichell Jr. Her two older sisters, Janet T. Singley and Abigail T. Gerhard, predeceased her.

There will be a celebration in honor of Ruth’s life on Sunday, May 30 at the Cleaveland House in the afternoon from 3 to 5 p.m.