Ostriker, Alicia

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a prolific major American feminist critic and poet who reframed the stereotypes of women in poetry, classical mythology, and the Bible by highlighting their familial roles as mothers, sisters, wives, and lovers. Beginning as a conventional academic, in the days when women had to make hard choices between careers and families, she chose to combine both, and eventually wrote landmark books describing experiential, political, and theological feminist frontiers.

Electing William Blake to be her early muse and the subject of her 1964 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin and the first of a series of critical works, Ostriker considered him a courageous rebel. She taught literature and writing at Rutgers University where she rose quickly to full professor in 1972. After ...