Join us as we celebrate the release of More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems, edited by Lisa Russ Spaar. This event will be free and open to the public. Please join poet, critic, professor, and editor Lisa Russ Spaar for the launch of her latest anthology, More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems (Persea Books, 2020). The “self” is so ubiquitously performed and shared in our moment that it is easy to become inured to the power of self-portrayal in art. In this anthology, a demographically and aesthetically diverse array of contemporary poets explores the complex and vexed notions of selfhood through poems as unique as their makers.
Reading from the anthology will be area contributors to the book, including Debra Nystrom, Gregory Orr, Kiki Petrosino, R. T. Smith, Brian Teare, and Charles Wright. Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of over ten books, most recently Orexia: Poems (Persea, 2017). Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEH Distinguished Professorship. Spaar’s poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize Anthology series, and in Poetry, Boston Review, IMAGE, The New Yorker, VQR, and elsewhere. Her essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.