Ostriker, Alicia

Alicia Suskin Ostriker was born on November 11, 1937, in Brooklyn, New York, to David and Beatrice Suskin. The Suskins moved to Manhattan when Alicia was six years old so that she could attend the Hunter College Elementary School for gifted children. During her high school years at Fieldston School, Alicia discovered poets on her own: Whitman, Keats, Donne, Auden, and others. "Each of them confirmed, in one way or another, the connection of the soul to the body," she later wrote.

Ostriker entered Brandeis College on full scholarship in the fall of 1955. While there she met and fell in love with a Harvard physics major named Jeremiah P. Ostriker. "Finally there was someone with whom I could speak without caution," she wrote of him. They were married in December of 1958. Ostriker earned her B.A. from Brandeis in 1959, and an M.A. (1961) and a Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Wisconsin. Her first child, Rebecca, was born in 1963. A second daughter, Eve, was born in 1965, and her son, Gabe, was born in 1970. Both a feminist literary critic and a poet, Ostriker published Vision and Verse in William Blake, her first book and an expansion of her dissertation, in 1965. Her first collection of verse, Songs, appeared in 1969.

In 1973, Ostriker co-founded the poetry cooperative US1 with Rob Tulloss. The group continues to meet weekly in the Princeton area, and its literary magazine U.S. 1 Worksheets, has been published continuously since the 1970s.

Ostriker came to prominence as both a poet and a critic in 1986, when she published her prize-winning volume The Imaginary Lover, a collection of poems, and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, in which she makes a controversial argument concerning the women's poetry movement in the postwar and post-1960s America. Her 1994 midrashic volume, The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, re-imagines biblical stories from "the Beginning" to Job and beyond from a contemporary Jewish woman's perspective. Green Age (1989) includes a seven-poem meditation on the many roles of women in Jewish history and culture. The Crack in Everything, a collection of poems that explores interests ranging from politics to Ostriker's battle with cancer, was published to acclaim in 1996. The Volcano Sequence (2002) continues Ostriker's encounter with Jewish tradition, as does her volume of prose essays For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book (2007). Recent books of poetry include The Book of Seventy (2009), At the Revelation Restaurant and Other Poems (2010), and The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (2014).

Ostriker's honors include the William Carlos Williams Prize (1986), the Paterson Poetry Prize (1996), the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award (1996), the Anna David Rosenberg Poetry Award (1994), the Larry Levis Prize, two Pushcart Prizes (1979 and 2000), a National Jewish Book Award for Poetry (2010), and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation (1984-85), the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (1976-77). She has twice been a National Book Award finalist, and she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2015. Alicia Ostriker is Professor emerita of Rutgers University and teaches in the Drew University Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program.