Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of three books of poetry: Satin Cash (Persea Books, 2008), Blue Venus (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2000. A new collection, Vanitas, Rough, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2012. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Blind Boy on Skates (Trilobite Press, 1986) and Cellar (Alderman Press, 1983). She is the editor of two books of poetry, All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008) and Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia University Press, 1999). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2008 (Scribner), Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, among other journals and anthologies. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the 2011 Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and was the recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2009. Spaar is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she is also the director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing. She also serves as the poetry editor for the Arts & Academe feature of The Chronicle of Higher Education.  

Photo by Jen Feriello