Writing Midrash with Alicia Ostriker (via Zoom)

Midrash writing is a modern adaptation of an ancient rabbinic form–retelling some of the compelling stories in the Bible, from the point of view of the characters. In workshop, we start by re-imagining Adam and Eve, then go on to more complicated tales, discovering what they can mean for us today. Participants work at speed—some exercises 1 minute, some exercises 7 minutes—in order to short-circuit mental censorship. Participants read their poems (or pass, if they are uncomfortable reading to a group), and we laugh, and sometimes cry. Expect the unpredictable.

This class will be composed of craft lecturing by Alicia Ostriker, with several writing prompts, and brief time for in-class writing.

Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. Author of 17 collections of poetry, she has been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors.  As a critic she 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, most recently For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. Her most recent collections of poems are Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019..Her poems have been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. She is currently the New York State Poet Laureate and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

“Alicia Ostriker has become one of those brilliantly provocative and imaginatively gifted contemporaries whose iconoclastic expression, whether in prose or poetry, is essential to understanding our American selves.”  —Joyce Carol Oates

“Ostriker is our morning-after psalmist; our wild, justice-starved, embodied, dazzling intelligence in its unending argument with itself, he world, and God.”—Eleanor Wilner

“Ostriker forges ahead, more audacious and sure-footed than ever, invigorated by her task to take us with her all the way. —Toi Derricotte