Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker at the National Book Festival, 2014
Born	(1937-11-11) November 11, 1937 (age 79) Brooklyn, New York
Alma mater	Brandeis University; University of Wisconsin–Madison
Genre	Poetry
Spouse	Jeremiah P. Ostriker
Children	Rebecca Ostriker Eve Ostriker Gabriel 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.

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.

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).