| Alicia Ostriker |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT ALICIA OSTRIKER | |
| 1937 births | |
| ostriker, alicia | |
| living people | |
| feminist writers | |
| american poets | |
| brandeis university alumni | |
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Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born to David Suskin and Beatrice Linnick Suskin. Her mother read her Shakespeare, and Alicia began writing poems at an early age. 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 . Her doctoral dissertation, on the work of William Blake , became her first book, ''Vision and Verse in William Blake'' ( 1965 ). 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 ), is considered a feminist classic. Ostriker began writing it upon the birth of her son during the Vietnam War ; throughout, she juxtaposes musings about motherhood with musings about war. ]]Ostriker's books of ), which approaches the Torah with a midrashic sensibility. Ostriker’s sixth collection of poems, ''The Imaginary Lover'' ( National Book Award finalist. Ostriker’s most recent nonfiction book is ''Dancing at the Devil’s Party'' ( 2000 ), where she examines the work of poets from Walt Whitman to Maxine Kumin . Early in the introduction to the book, she disagrees with W.H. Auden ’s assertion that poetry makes nothing happen. Poetry, Ostriker writes, "can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror {Link without Title} ” Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker . She currently teaches poetry in New England College's Low-Residency MFA Program. REFERENCES |
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