She was Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she taught since 1982.
Her sixth collection of poems is One Blackbird at a Time, winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry (BkMk Press, 2015).
Translations (with Amritjit Singh) of the Punjabi poet Gurcharan Rampuri have appeared in The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad.
Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Russian, and Bulgarian.
"A wonderful book of poems" that are "full of ferocity and rapture, a joy to read," states Alicia Ostriker Barker's fifth collection of poems, Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years, a novel in prose poems set in Berkeley in the sixties (Del Sol Press, 2009), has been described as "unforgettably moving" by Sandra M. Gilbert; "a captivating page-turner" by Alicia Ostriker; and an "exciting tribute to a decade of change" by Denise Duhamel.