Please join us for the first Faculty Reading this year, featuring Kevin Moffett and Lisa Russ Spaar.

Kevin Moffett is an award-winning fiction writer who is interested in formal experimentation, oral histories, and the short story. His most recent book, The Silent History, written and designed in collaboration with Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby, first debuted as a serialized digital narrative for mobile devices. The core narrative is supplemented by over 400 location-specific entries that can only be accessed at various sites around the world. Referencing the novel’s bold storytelling experiment, The New York Times wrote, “This fascinating project manages to feel relentlessly thoughtful and new.”

Moffett is the author of two collections of short stories, as well as a pair of scripted podcasts for Gimlet Media: Sandra, starring Kristen Wiig and Alia Shawkat, and The Final Chapters of Richard Brown Winters, starring Catherin Keener and Sam Waterston. His honors include a National Magazine Award, a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Webby Award for digital innovation, and inclusion in four editions of The Best American Short Stories.

Moffett holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Florida and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He directs the Literary Prose concentration in the Creative Writing Program at UVA, and his debut novel Only Son - "a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home" - will be published by McSweeney's in November.

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of a novel, Paradise Close (Persea, 2022); six acclaimed collections of poetry, including Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea, 2021), Orexia (Persea, 2017), Vanitas, Rough  (Persea, 2013), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), and Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999); and two poetry chapbooks, Blind Boy on Skates (1986) and Cellar (1983).

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 four poetry anthologies, including More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems (Persea, 2020), Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 2016), All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008), and Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia University Press, 1999). 

Of her poetry, 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.” 

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, where for many years she directed the MFA program.