Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (1999, Red Hen Press), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008) and Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012).  She is the editor of Acquainted with the Night:  Insomnia Poems and All that Mighty Heart:  London Poems, and a collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse:  Annotations on Contemporary Poetry, a selection of her commentaries for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has just been published.  Her awards include 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.  Her poem have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, Boston Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and quarterlies, and her commentaries, essays, reviews, and columns about poetry have appeared regularly in The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as in the Washington Post and elsewhere.  Spaar writes a regular column about second books of poetry for the Los Angeles Review of Books.  She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.