Poetry Reading with Alicia Ostriker, Roger Reeves, and Jeffrey Yang (via Zoom)

This reading will take place via Zoom. The Zoom link will be emailed at the time of registration. (Please check spam / promotions folder for this email and email admin@writerscenter.org with any questions.) This reading is free and open to the public, though we would be most appreciative of a donation.

Please register to get the Zoom link at https://www.writerscenter.org/calendar/ostrikerreevesyang/

Alicia Ostriker, a poet and critic, has published seventeen volumes of poetry, including The Volcano and After (2020), Waiting for the Light (2017), which received the National Jewish Book Award, The Book of Seventy, which received that award in 2009, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (2014), The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011; and No Heaven (2005). Her 1980 feminist classic and anti-war poem sequence, The Mother/Child Papers, was recently reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The Volcano Sequence, a volume of spiritual quest and questioning, wrestles with Jewish traditions. 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, Ostriker is known for her intelligence and passionate appraisal of women’s place in literature, and for investigating themes of family and sexuality, politics, religion, Jewish identity, and celebration of city life. Ostriker’s poetry is at once moving and new, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and also opens the heart and mind again. Or, as Joan Larkin puts it, “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.”

Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Ostriker has performed her work widely in the USA, and has performed, lectured, and led workshops in England, France, Italy, Israel, Japan, and China. In 2015, Ostriker was appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, Everywoman Her Own Theology, a volume of essays on Ostriker’s poetry, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. Ostriker lives in New York City, is Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University, and teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University. She says, “If I did not have teaching to do, I would not recognize myself.”

Roger Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Princeton University. An associate professor of poetry in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin, Reeves was the February 2020 guest editor for Poem-a-Day. His second collection of poetry, On Paradise, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.

Jeffrey Yang is the Graywolf Press author of Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is the translator of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies. Yang lives in Beacon, New York.