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 several books, including 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, incantory, 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.”

She 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).

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