Acclaimed poet Lisa Russ Spaar will be reading on Thursday, February 22, as part of the English Department’s Spring 2018 Visiting Writers series. The reading begins at 7:30 p.m. in George’s, 3rd floor of the Johnson Center, on Mason’s Fairfax Campus, and is free and open to the public. Books will be for sale after the reading.
Spaar is the author/editor of over ten books of poetry and criticism, including Monticello in Mind: 50 Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 2016) and Orexia: Poems (Persea Books, 2017), her fifth full-length poetry collection. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. Spaar’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize Anthology series and are frequently reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Recently, her work has appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, IMAGE, Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Harvard Review, and many other journals and quarterlies.
She is a professor in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of Virginia. Among her awards for teaching are an All University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the 2013-2014 Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professorship appointment for 2016 - 2018. She was a 2014 Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing and one of three national finalists for the 2016 Cherry Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Her commentaries, reviews, and columns about poetry have appeared regularly or are forthcoming in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
The Visiting Writer series will continue in early April as part of the English Department’s annual New Leaves Conference. Stay tuned for more information and a full schedule of events.
February 16, 2018
