Sometimes it feels as if all the buzz in literature, especially poetry, is about youth. Who won the Yale Younger Poets Award? The XYZ Fellowship for Writers Under Thirty? That's only one of the reasons we're thrilled for Lisa Russ Spaar, who nearly a decade after being nationally recognized as an "emerging writer" by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Lisa Russ Spaar has not only emerged, but stayed on top of her game (winning a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship only last year).

Not surprisingly, she's been a mentor to a new generation of poets, founding the University of Virginia's undergraduate poetry program. This week, we're happy to spread the word that Spaar, along with the iconic Charles Wright, has been chosen to receive a Library of Virginia Literary award :

Spaar won for her third and most recent book, "Satin Cash." The judges said her poems "abound in surprising inversions of syntax, and a diction striking for its sudden shifts from demotic to baroquely laden speech — from imagistic precision to statement."

Read Spaar's poetry and see video of a reading at Women's Voices For Change

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