American poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker is Butler’s next visiting writer. The woman once called “America’s most fiercely honest poet” by Joel Brouwer of Progressive will be giving a reading as part of the Visiting Writers Series October 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the Clowes Hall Krannert Room. Amongst an almost innumerable list of honors and awards, Ostriker is a two-time National Book Award finalist, a Guggenheim fellow, and her 2010 book of poetry The Book of Seventy won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry as well as the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.

Ostriker’s poetry and nonfiction are most deeply entrenched in her Jewish roots and feminist leanings, but she is unafraid to tackle war, politics and environmental issues. Her fourth book The Mother-Child Papers juxtaposes the birth of her son during the Vietnam War with the Kent State shootings that happened only weeks later, and her recent poem published in Poets for Living Waters, “Gaia Regards Her Children,” opens with the line, “Ingratitude after all I have done for them ingratitude.” Continue reading →

American poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker is Butler’s next visiting writer. The woman once called “America’s most fiercely honest poet” by Joel Brouwer of Progressive will be giving a reading as part of the Visiting Writers Series October 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the Clowes Hall Krannert Room. Amongst an almost innumerable list of honors and awards, Ostriker is a two-time National Book Award finalist, a Guggenheim fellow, and her 2010 book of poetry The Book of Seventy won the National Jewish Book Award in poetry as well as the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.

Ostriker’s poetry and nonfiction are most deeply entrenched in her Jewish roots and feminist leanings, but she is unafraid to tackle war, politics and environmental issues. Her fourth book The Mother-Child Papers juxtaposes the birth of her son during the Vietnam War with the Kent State shootings that happened only weeks later, and her recent poem published in Poets for Living Waters, “Gaia Regards Her Children,” opens with the line, “Ingratitude after all I have done for them ingratitude.” Continue reading →