Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker is a major American Jewish poet and critic.  Her 16th collection of poems, Waiting for the Light, received the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry; her collection The Book of Seventy won that award in 2010.  She is also twice a National Book Award finalist, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award and the William Carlos Williams Award, and is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.   Ostriker’s 2012 collection The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011, was awarded the Paterson Prize.  As a critic, Ostriker is the author of the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible, including the controversial midrashic work The Nakedness of the Fathers:  Biblical Visions and Revisions and For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book.  Her work has been translated into many languages including Hebrew and Arabic.