Alicia Ostriker

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.

Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood.

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.

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.

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

She has been a resident of Princeton, New Jersey.

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.

She 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.

Her books, Songs (1969) and A Dream of Springtime (1979), spotlight her own illustrations.

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.

She is married to astronomer Jeremiah P. Ostriker, who taught at Princeton University (1971–2001).

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.

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).

In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.

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.