Meet our TQ3 Poetry Contest Judge: Alicia Ostriker


alicia-ostriker-by-JP-Ostri
 
Major American poet and critic Alicia Ostriker has been twice nominated for a National Book Award, and is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry, including The Book of Seventy (2009), which won the Jewish Book Award for Poetry, and The Old Woman, the Tulip and the Dog, published in 2014.
 

As a critic Ostriker is the author of two pathbreaking volumes on women’s poetry, Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. She has also published three books on the Bible, Feminist Revision and the Bible, the controversial The Nakedness of the Fathers; Biblical Visions and Revisions, a combination of prose and poetry that re-imagines the Bible from the perspective of a contemporary Jewish woman, and a set of essays, For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book. Her most recent book of criticism is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic.
 

Ostriker’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Antaeus, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, MS, Tikkun, and many other journals, and her work has been widely anthologized. Her poetry and essays have been translated into French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic. She has lectured and given performances of her work throughout the USA, as well as in Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan and China.
 

Ostriker has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ostriker is Professor Emerita of Rutgers University and is a faculty member of the New England College Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program. Ostriker has taught in the Princeton University Creative Writing Program and in Toni Morrison’s Atelier Program. She has taught midrash writing workshops in the USA, Israel, England and Australia.
 

In a discussion with Contemporary Authors, Ostriker said: “As an American poet I see myself in the line of Whitman, Williams, and Ginsberg, those great enablers of the inclusive democratic impulse, the corollary of which is formal openness.” You can read more about her at The Poetry Foundation.