New York, NY (August 16, 2018)— Academy of American Poets Chancellor Alicia Ostriker has been named the 11th New York State Poet in history by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today. She will receive the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poets and succeed Yusef Komunyakaa.
“New York has long been an epicenter for arts and culture, and this award celebrates some of the state's most talented and influential writers in their respective fields,” Governor Cuomo said.
The Governor noted that Ostriker is being recognized for her collective body of work and the impact it has had on the people of New York and beyond. She joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served in the position, including Academy Chancellor Marie Howe, Jean Valentine, Billy Collins, John Ashbery, Sharon Olds, Jane Cooper, Richard Howard, Audre Lorde, Robert Creeley, and Stanley Kunitz.
She is the author of more than ten poetry collections, including Waiting for the Light (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), which received the 2017 Berru Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash from the Jewish Book Council; The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014); At the Revelation Restaurant and Other Poems (Marick Press, 2010); The Book of Seventy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); The Volcano Sequence (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002); The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) which was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Crack in Everything (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), which was a National Book Award finalist and won both the Paterson Poetry Award and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award; and The Imaginary Lover (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. Ostriker was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2015.
An essay collection about Ostriker’s work, Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker, will be published next month by the University of Michigan Press.