Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937) is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University (1971–2001). She currently teaches poetry at Drew University's Low-Residency MFA Program in poetry and poetry in translation.

Early life

Ostriker was born in Brooklyn, New York to David Suskin and Beatrice Linnick Suskin. Her father worked for New York City Parks Department. Her mother read her Shakespeare and Browning, and Alicia began writing poems, as well as drawing, from an early age. Initially, she had hoped to be an artist and studied art as a teenager. Her books, Songs (1969) and A Dream of Springtime (1979), spotlight her own illustrations. Ostriker went to high school at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in 1955.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University (1959), and an M.A. (1961) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her doctoral dissertation, on the work of William Blake, became her first book, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965) later, she edited and annotated Blake's complete poems for Penguin Press.

Career and work

She began her teaching career at Rutgers University in 1965 and has served as a professor of English there since 1972. In 1969 her first collection of poems, Songs, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Her fourth book of poems, The Mother-Child Papers (1980), a feminist classic, was inspired by the birth of her son during the Vietnam War and weeks after the Kent State shootings ;throughout, she juxtaposes musings about motherhood with musings about war.

Alicia Ostriker howling: remembering Allen Ginsberg.

Ostriker's books of nonfiction explore many of the same themes manifest in her verse. They include Writing Like A Woman (1983), which explores the poems of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, H.D., May Swenson and Adrienne Rich, and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994), which approaches the Torah with a midrashic sensibility. She wrote the introduction to the collected works of Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi entitled Empire of Dreams (1994).

Ostriker’s sixth collection of poems, The Imaginary Lover (1986), won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. The Crack in Everything (1996) was a National Book Award finalist, and won the Paterson Poetry Award and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award. The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 was also a 1998 National Book Award finalist.

Ostriker’s most recent nonfiction book is Dancing at the Devil’s Party (2000), where she examines the work of poets from Walt Whitman to Maxine Kumin. Early in the introduction to the book, she disagrees with W. H. Auden’s assertion that poetry makes nothing happen. Poetry, Ostriker writes, "can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror [.]”

A variety of Ostriker's poems have been translated into Italian, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic. Stealing the Language has been translated into Japanese and published in Japan.

Works

Honors, Fellowships, and Awards

• 1964-5 American Association of University Women Fellowship
• 1966 Rutgers University Research Council summer scholar grant
• 1967 American Foundation for the Advancement of Humanities Younger Scholar Grant
• 1974, 1976, 1985, 1997, 2000 MacDowell Colony Fellow
• 1976-7 National Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry
• 1977 Breadloaf Writers' Conference Fellowship, l977
• 1977 New Jersey Arts Council Award in Poetry, 1977
• 1979 A Dream of Springtime selected as one of best small press titles by I
• 1982 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for Research in the Humanities
• 1984-5 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Poetry, 1984-5
• 1986 Strousse Poetry Prize, Prairie Schooner, 1986
• 1986 Poetry Society of America William Carlos Williams Prize for The Imaginary Lover
• 1987 Rutgers University Trustees Award for Excellence in Research
• 1987 Djerassi Foundation Resident, summer
• 1992 New Jersey Arts Council Award in Poetry
• 1994 Edward Stanley Award, for poems published in Prairie Schooner
• 1994 Judah Magnes Jewish Museum, Berkeley, Anna David Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. First Prize for "The Eighth and Thirteenth."
• 1995 Rutgers University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributors to Undergraduate Education
• 1995-6 Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
• 1996-7 Associate Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis
• 1996 The Crack in Everythingfinalist for a National Book Award
• 1996 Poem in Best American Poetry
• 1996 Poem inYearbook of American Poetry
• 1997 Paterson Poetry Prize for The Crack in Everything
• 1998 San Francisco State Poetry Center Award for The Crack in Everything
• 1998 Readers’ Choice Award for poems published in Prairie Schooner
• 1998 The Little Space finalist for a National Book Award
• 1999 The Little Space finalist for Lenore Marshall Prize, Academy of American Poets
• I999 February Residency at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Italy
• 1999 Poem in Pushcart Prize Anthology
• 2000 San Diego Women’s Institute for Continuing Jewish Education: Endowment Award
• 2001 (fall)Visiting Fellowship, Clare Hall, Cambridge University
• 2002 Larry Levis Prize for poems published in Prairie Schooner
• 2003Best American Essays Notable Essay for “Milk.”
• 2003 Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellow
• 2007 Anderbo Poetry Prize distinguished poem
• 2008 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice June 2008, for For the Love of God.
• 2010 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry for The Book of Seventy
• 2010 Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing

for poems published in summer 2009 issue.

• 2010 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement for The Book of Seventy
• 2011 Named in list of “10 Great Jewish Poets” in Moment

Books of Poetry

• Songs: A Book of Poems. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1969.
• Once More Out of Darkness and Other Poems. Berkeley: Berkeley Poets' Press, 1974.
• A Dream of Springtime: Poems 1970-1978. New York: Smith/Horizon Press, 1979.
• The Mother/Child Paper. Los Angeles: Momentum Press, 1980. Rpt. Beacon Press, 1986, Pittsburgh, 2008.
• A Woman Under the Surface. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
• The Imaginary Lover. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986.
• Green Age. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.
• The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. Rutgers University Press, 1994.
• The Crack in Everything. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
• The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. 1998, University of Pittsburgh.
• The Volcano Sequence. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
• The Book of Seventy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009

Critical and Scholarly Books

• Vision and Verse in William Blake. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965

• William Blake: the Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Edited with Notes, pp. 870-1075.

• Writing Like a Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, 1983.

• Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon 1986

• Feminist Revision and the Bible: the Bucknell Lectures on Literary Theory. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell 1993 .

• Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series 2000.

• For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Journals in which Poetry Has Appeared

The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Shenandoah Review, Antaeus, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Boulevard, Poetry East, New England Review, Santa Monica Review, Triquarterly Review, Seneca Review, Ms, Ontario Review, Bridges, Tikkun, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Lyric, Fence, Ploughshares.

Further reading

• Poets on the Psalms featuring Alicia Ostriker. Edited by Lynn Domina (Trinity University Press, 2008).
• Sin:Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad. ISBN 978-1-55728-948-3
• No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series) ISBN 0-8229-5875-9
• The Crack In Everything (Pitt Poetry Series) ISBN 0-8229-5593-8
• The Mother/Child Papers. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8229-6033-1