Lisa Russ Spaar

Lecture: "Using Words Hard: A Poetics of Childhood," Tuesday, November 15, 3:30 p.m., Armstrong Browning Library, Treasure Room

Poetry Reading: Wednesday, November 16, 4:00 p.m., Armstrong Browning Library, Treasure Room, CAE credit event

Lisa Russ Spaar serves as Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Spaar’s most recent collection of poems is Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (2021). Her other books of poetry include Orexia (2017), Vanitas, Rough (2012), Satin Cash (2008), Blue Venus (2004), and Glass Town (1999). She also is the author of the essay collection The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (2013) and is the editor of the anthologies Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (2016), All that Mighty Heart: London Poems (2008), and Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems (1999).

Spaar is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing. A 2016 finalist for Baylor University’s Cherry Teaching Award, she delivered the “Virginia Beall Ball Lecture in Contemporary Poetry” at the Baylor Poetry Festival in 2018. She is serving as the inaugural Beall Visiting Poet.