Lisa Russ Spaar teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia, where she is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program. Her new book of poems, Blue Venus, is forthcoming from Persea Books in August 2004. She is also the author of a collection of poems, Glass Town (Red Hen Press), for which she won the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers for 2002, and is the editor of the anthology Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia, 1999). Her work has appeared in a number of national and international literary journals, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received numerous awards, including the Academy of American Poets Prize at the University of Virginia.