DURHAM, N.H. -- Alicia Ostriker, poet, critic and activist, will deliver the Hans Heilbronner Lecture Wednesday, April 23, 2014, at 7 p.m. in Richards Auditorium, Murkland Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

Ostriker will discuss the controversies surrounding poetry after the Holocaust: Should poetry exist at all after the Holocaust, who has the right to speak, where does "art" come in, and what is the ultimate value of poetry after the Holocaust? Ostriker will also read a selection of her poetry. At the conclusion of the program, Ostriker will be available to sign books. Select books will be available for purchase.

Ostriker has published 14 volumes of poetry, including "The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011," "No Heaven; The Volcano Sequence," and "The Imaginary Lover," winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. Her next book, "The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog," will be out in winter 2014. She was twice a National Book Award Finalist, for "The Little Space" (1998) and "The Crack in Everything" (1996). She is known for her intelligence and passionate appraisal of women's place in literature, and for investigating themes of family, social justice, Jewish identity, and personal growth. Ostriker's poetry is at once moving and new, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and also opens the heart and mind again. 

Ostriker's critical work includes the now-classic "Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women's Poetry in America," and other books on American poetry from Walt Whitman to the present. Her 1980 feminist classic and anti-war poem sequence, "The Mother/Child Papers," was recently reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

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 lives in Princeton, N.J., is professor emerita of English at Rutgers University, and teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University.

The Hans Heilbronner lecture series honors the memory of Hans Heilbronner, professor of history, who served the University of New Hampshire with distinction from 1954 until 1991. This event is sponsored by the Endowed Fund for Holocaust Education, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Departments of English and Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea, and space-grant university, UNH is the state's flagship public institution, enrolling 12,300 undergraduate and 2,200 graduate students.

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Alicia Ostriker, poet, critic and activist, will deliver the Hans Heilbronner Lecture Wednesday, April 23, 2014.
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