Lisa Russ Spaar Reading

Poet Lisa Russ Spaar will read at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 21, in the Robinson Reading Room of the WVU Library. This reading is sponsored by the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences. It is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Spaar is the author of Satin Cash (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 The Land of Wandering: Exquisite History, Volume 1 (The Printmakers Left / University of Virginia Press, 2005), and numerous anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2008. She is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (Trilobite/University of North Texas Press, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press/University of Virginia, 1983), and is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999) and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008).

Spaar's work has appeared in many literary journals, including Denver Quarterly, Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar is the Director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing, an Advising Fellow, and the winner of an All-University Teaching Award, a Harrison Award for Undergraduate Advising, and a Mead Honored Faculty Award.

"It's an honor and a pleasure to have Lisa Russ Spaar read her work at WVU," said Mark Brazaitis, the director of WVU's Creative Writing Program. "Her poety is precise, elegant, and evocative. And her insomnia anthology is must reading for anyone who has ever been acquainted a little too intimately with deep hours of the night."

For more information, contact Mark Brazatis, director of creative writing, at (304) 293-9707 or Mark.Brazaitis@mail.wvu.edu.