Poet Jacqueline Osherow, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah, will present this year’s annual Dr. Maurice Sitomer Lecture.

Jacqueline Osherow is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple (LSU Press, 2019). Her ninth poetry collection, Divine Ratios, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2023. She’s received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as a number of prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, the Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry, The Longman Anthology of Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Twentieth Century American Poetry and The Making of a Poem.

Says Osherow, “When a member of a panel on Jewish-American Poetry on which I was a participant explained to the audience that some of his poems were Jewish poems, some were not, I leaned over to a person sitting beside me and said, ‘If I wrote it, it’s a Jewish poem.’ In this lecture, I hope to trace and explore and demonstrate the Jewish roots of my poems—from biblical text to Yiddish to Jewish history to my very Jewish interactions with non-Jewish subjects, from Renaissance frescoes to a ride in a Shanghai taxi.”