Alicia Ostriker

In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.

• Name — Alicia Suskin Ostriker • Born — 11 November 1937 • Birthplace — Brooklyn, New York, U.S. • Occupation — Poet • Education — Brandeis University, B.A. (1959); University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.A. (1961), Ph.D.(1964) • Alma Mater — Brandeis University; University of Wisconsin–Madison • Genre — Poetry • Children — Rebecca Ostriker Eve Ostriker Gabriel Ostriker

Ostriker was born in Brooklyn, New York, to David Suskin and Beatrice Linnick Suskin. She grew up in the Manhattan housing projects during the Great Depression. Her father worked for New York City Parks Department. Her mother read her William Shakespeare and Robert 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. Ostriker holds a bachelor's degree from Brandeis University (1959), and an M.A. (1961) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In Ostriker's first year of graduate school, she attended a conference where a visiting professor commented on her poetry by saying, "'You women poets are very graphic, aren't you?'" This comment caused her to reflect on the meaning of being a woman poet. She had never thought of that term before and she realized that men were uncomfortable when women wrote about their own bodies. This encounter became a defining moment in her life and from that moment on, she wrote poems discussing the various facets of a woman: sexuality, motherhood, pregnancy, and mortality. On the other hand, 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. Ostriker was married to astronomer Jeremiah P. Ostriker, who taught at Princeton University (1971–2001), from 1958 until his death in 2025. They have three children: Rebecca (1963), Eve (1965), and Gabriel (1970). She has been a resident of Princeton, New Jersey.

Ostriker began her teaching career at Rutgers University in 1965 and has served as an English professor until she retired in 2004. Ostriker decided to pursue a career while also taking care of her children which was very uncommon during this time. Ostriker's ambition, desire to live a life different from her mother's, and her husband's refusal to let her become a housewife influenced her to make that choice. In 1969, her first collection of poems, Songs, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. This collection contained poems that she wrote while she was still a student. Her poems reflect the influence poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, W.H. Auden, William Blake, and Walt Whitman have had on her and her poetry. Her second collection of poems published was Once More Out of Darkness. Majority of the poems were written in free verse. While she was writing this collection of poems, Ostriker became aware of her feminist views. The poems that compose this collection were based on her first two experiences of pregnancy and childbirth as she had her first two children 18 months apart. Discussing these topics in her poems made her cognizant of the fact that she had not previously read poems about these topics and that she was breaking a taboo. Her third volume of poems, A Dream of Springtime, had poems that demonstrated her growth by discussing her emerging from her past and discovering herself and her identity. 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. She also discusses her husband and her other two children in her poems. This collection allowed her to explore her identity as a woman by examining her role as a mother, wife, and professor. It did take her ten years to write the poems that make up this collection as she gained more inspiration from events that were happening in society such as the American Feminist movement. • Illustration — 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 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 poems included in this collection had a feminist voice, probably due to fact that at the same time, she was doing research for her second feminist criticism book, Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women Poets in America. In The Imaginary Lover, Ostriker examines the fantasies associated with womanhood by discussing topics such as mother-daughter relationships and marriage. 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. Green Age (1989) was Ostriker's most visionary and successful collection of poems. Themes analyzed in this collection was time, history and politics, and inner spirituality and how these helped her heal. Ostriker highlights how there is a lack of feminist spirituality in traditional religions. 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, and 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. Her fifty-year poetry career is the subject of a collection of essays by American poets and feminist literary scholars, entitled "Every Woman Her Own Theology".

• 1996 The Crack in Everything finalist of the National Book Award for Poetry • 1998 The Little Space finalist of the National Book Award for Poetry • 1999 The Little Space finalist for Lenore Marshall Prize, Academy of American Poets

• |Title — |Year — |First published — |Reprinted/collected • April — 2011

• Alicia Ostriker's poem “A Young Woman, a Tree” appears in Kurt Cobain's posthumously published Journals. • in Giannina Braschi's Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), poets and philosophers discuss the state of American poetry and mention Stealing the Language.

* • 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 Papers. Los Angeles: Momentum Press, 1980. Rpt. Beacon Press, 1986, Pittsburgh, 2008. * • The Imaginary Lover. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986. • Green Age. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. • 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, 2002. • No Heaven. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. • The Book of Seventy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, • At the Revelation Restaurant and Other Poems, Marick Press, 2010, • The Book of Life: Selected Poems 1979-2011, Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, • The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, • Waiting for the Light, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017, • The Holy and Broken Bliss, Alice James Books, 2024,