Alicia Suskin Ostriker  (b. 1937) LINKS Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic—Essays by Alicia Suskin Ostriker http://www.pifmagazine.com/2000/05/b_a_ostriker.php3 Poetry “can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror,” Rachel Barenblat, co-founder of Inkberry, a literary organization in the Berkshires, quotes in her review of Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s collection of essays, Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. The Little Space,, Alicia Suskin Ostriker http://www.pitt.edu/~press/bip/fa98trans/ostriker.html This site shows off Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s new collection of poems, The Little Space. BIOGRAPHY Ostriker was born and grew up in New York City. Her Jewish grandparents came to America in the 1880s, and her college-educated, working-class parents instilled the values she lives by: work hard, love books, promote social justice. Ostriker’s mother wrote poetry and read poetry to her daughter. As an English major at Brandeis University and a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Ostriker read and wrote poetry constantly. She has since published nine collections—most recently The Crack in Everything (1996) and The Little Space: Poems Collected and New (1998). Both collections were finalists for the National Book Award. Her critical studies include Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (1986) and Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic (2000). Biblical study led her to write The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994). Her many awards include recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband, the astrophysicist Jeremiah Ostriker, and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University.