Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar received a BA from the University of Virginia in 1978 and an MFA in 1982. She is the author of numerous books, including the poetry collections Paradise Close: A Novel (Persea Books, 2022); Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea Books, 2021); Orexia (Persea Books, 2017), Vanitas, Rough (Persea Books, 2012); and Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999).

The Boston Review notes, “Lisa Russ Spaar’s intensely lyrical language—baroque, incantatory, provocative—enables her to reinvigorate perennial subject matter: desire, pursuit, and absence; intoxication and ecstasy; the transience of earthly experience; the uncertainties of god and grave; the dialectic between fertility and mortality.”

Russ Spaar is also the author of The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (Drunken Boat Media, 2013), a collection of poetry history and criticism, and she was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She has edited multiple poetry anthologies, including Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 2016).

Russ Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia.