Lisa Russ Spaar
Professor of English and Creative Writing
University of Virginia
Lisa Russ Spaar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where she has taught since 1995. For eleven years, she served as administrator and then director of the nationally acclaimed Creative Writing Program. She is also the founder and director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing, an undergraduate concentration within the English major, now in its tenth year. Her interdisciplinary projects include a joint printmaking/poetry writing class and Kinetics: UVArt&Poetry in Motion, a project that puts posters of undergraduate art and poetry on UTS buses.
Professor Spaar is the author of seven books, including Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books, 2008), Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. Twelve of her poems appear in Exquisite History: The Land of Wandering: Poems & Prints (The Printmakers Left, University of Virginia Press, 2005) and numerous anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2008. She is the editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999) and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008).
Professor Spaar’s work is often anthologized, and has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Denver Quarterly, Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.
The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Professor Spaar is an Advising Fellow in the College of Arts & Sciences, and winner of an All-University Teaching Award (2009), a Harrison Award for Undergraduate Advising, and a Mead Honored Faculty Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009/2010 and the 2009 Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry. Professor Spaar earned her Master’s of Fine Arts from the University of Virginia.
"Like many who teach, I do so because I loved being a student and am grateful for the ways in which teaching invites a lifetime practice of intellectual, creative rigor and of (re)visiting texts and the blank page in fresh ways. Teaching allows me continually to be inspired by dialogue with intelligent young people, and to exercise daily my discernment, experimentation, open-mindedness, and imagination."