Genre Poetry Name Alicia Ostriker | Role Poet Spouse Jeremiah P. Ostriker | |
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Born November 11, 1937 (age 86)
Brooklyn, New York ( 1937-11-11 ) Alma mater Brandeis University;
University of Wisconsin–Madison Children Rebecca Ostriker
Eve Ostriker
Gabriel Ostriker Education University of Wisconsin-Madison (1964), Brandeis University Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Nominations National Book Award for Poetry Books Stealing the Languag, The little space, The crack in everything, The Mother/Child Papers, The volcano sequence Similar People Jeremiah P Ostriker, Jack Stillinger, John Milton | ||
Alicia ostriker 2014 national book festival
Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937) is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet," by Progressive.
Contents
- Alicia ostriker 2014 national book festival
- Alicia ostriker dear poet 2016
- Personal life and education
- Career and work
- Honors fellowships and awards
- References
Alicia ostriker dear poet 2016
Personal life and education
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. Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University (1971–2001). Based in New York City, she currently teaches poetry at Drew University's Low-Residency MFA Program in poetry and poetry in translation.
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.
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 Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams, a postmodern poetry classic of the Spanish Caribbean (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 For the Love of God (2007), a work that continues her midrash exploration of biblical texts begun with Feminist Revision and the Bible (1993) and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994). Dancing at the Devil’s Party (2000) examines the work of poets from William Blake and 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[.]”
Ostriker's poems have appeared in a wide variety of periodicals, including 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.
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.