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

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 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. They have three children: Rebecca (1963), Eve (1965), and Gabriel (1970).

Career and work

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. 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.

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 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".

Honors, fellowships, and awards

  • 1964-1965 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
  • 1976-1977 National Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry
  • 1977 Breadloaf Writers' Conference Fellowship
  • 1977 New Jersey Arts Council Award in Poetry
  • 1979 A Dream of Springtime selected as one of the best small press titles
  • 1982 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for Research in the Humanities
  • 1984-1985 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Poetry
  • 1986 Strousse Poetry Prize, Prairie Schooner
  • 1986 Poetry Society of America William Carlos Williams Prize for The Imaginary Lover
  • 1987 Rutgers University Trustees Award for Excellence in Research
  • Summer 1987 Djerassi Foundation Resident
  • 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 Poem in The Best American Poetry
  • 1996 Poem in Yearbook 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
  • February 1999 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
  • Fall 2001 Visiting Fellowship, Clare Hall, Cambridge
  • 2002 Larry Levis Prize for poems published in Prairie Schooner
  • 2003 Best 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.
  • 2009 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 the summer 2009 issue.
  • 2010 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement for The Book of Seventy
  • 2011 Named in the list of “10 Great Jewish Poets” in Moment
  • 2017 National Jewish Book Award in the Poetry category for Waiting for the Light
  • 1998 The Little Space finalist of the National Book Award for Poetry
  • in Giannina Braschi's Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), poets and philosophers discuss the state of American poetry and mention Stealing the Language.

References

Further reading

  • Poets on the Psalms featuring Alicia Ostriker. Edited by Lynn Domina (Trinity University Press, 2008).
  • Sin:Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad.
  • No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series)
  • The Crack In Everything (Pitt Poetry Series)
  • The Mother/Child Papers. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
  • Poetry Foundation page
  • poets.org page
  • Jewish Women's Archive page