Biography

LISA RUSS SPAAR is the author of Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books, 2008), Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. Her poems appear in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2008. She is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (University of North Texas Press, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press, 1983), and is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia University Press, 1999) as well as All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Denver Quarterly, Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. She is the Poetry Editor of the Arts & Academe column of the Chronicle of Higher Eductation Review. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar directs the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English, an Advising Fellow, and the winner of an All-University Teaching Award (2009), a Harrison Award for Undergraduate Advising, and a Mead Honored Faculty Award. She was awarded a 2010 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009-2010.