National Jewish Book Award winner, William Carlos Williams Award winner, and twice National Book Award Finalist, poet and critic Alicia Ostriker will offer a reading as this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecturer. Free and open to the public, the reading will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, September 23, as a VIRTUAL event on Zoom.

Called “America’s most fiercely honest poet” by The Progressive, Ostriker is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry, which often explore such topics as family relationships, sexuality, politics, and religion (specifically Jewish identity). Her most recent collection is “The Volcano and After” (2020). Two of Ostriker’s earlier collections, “Waiting for the Light” (2017) and “The Book of Seventy” (2009), received the National Jewish Book Award.  Twice a National Book Award Finalist, for “The Little Space” (1998) and “The Crack in Everything” (1996), and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award for “The Imaginary Lover” (1986), Ostriker is also known for her intelligent and passionate appraisal of women’s place in literature.

Ostriker’s critical work includes the now-classic “Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America,” and other books on American poetry from Walt Whitman to the present. She is also the author of critical books on the Bible, including the controversial “The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions.”

 Her most recent poetry collection, published in 2020, “The Volcano and After” meshes together new and old poems from 2002-2019 that follow the challenges a person faces as they age. Joan Larkin describes “The Volcano and After” this way: “In a voice absolutely her own—wild, earthy, irreverent, full of humor and surprise—Ostriker takes on nothing less than what it feels like to be alive.”

In an interview with Vanderbilt, Ostriker calls writing a “spiritual experience” and goes on to say that the writer can “experience himself/herself as a vessel the wind of the spirit blows through,” and says further that to have this experience, you have to want it.

Ostriker lives in New York City. She taught at Rutgers University until 2004 and is currently Professor Emerita of English in the creative writing department there. She has also taught in two different MFA programs. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and many other outstanding journals.

The Emily Dickinson Lectureship in American Poetry is made possible through the generosity of Penn State Alumni George and Barbara Kelly. Additional support for the event is provided by the Penn State Department of English and the College of the Liberal Arts.

Advance registration for this virtual event is required and can be accessed via Zoom:

https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3B7-QTKWQbmoKPRgNs4LCg