Jackie Osherow

Poet

Jackie Osherow is an acclaimed American poet whose work bridges the sacred and the everyday with remarkable grace. Raised in Philadelphia, she earned her BA from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and her PhD from Princeton University. Osherow is the author of several distinguished poetry collections, including Hoopoe's Crown (2005). Her debut, Looking for Angels in New York (1988), was selected for the Contemporary Poetry Series, launching a career marked by both formal mastery and intimate accessibility.

Her poetry inhabits demanding structures—terza rima, double sestinas—yet remains conversational and deeply human. Publishers Weekly praised her as "a poet who offers opinions and reactions to the weightiest questions of history and religion, while sounding less like an authority than like a particularly well-traveled friend." Drawing from biblical inconsistencies and the psalms she heard as a child at temple, Osherow writes, "If I write out of a specific poetic tradition, it is the Jewish poetic tradition, American poet though I am."

Her honors include the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, multiple Poetry Society of America prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Osherow's work appears in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, and twice in Best American Poetry, among other major anthologies.