Spahr, Juliana 1966-

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Spahr, Juliana 1966-

PERSONAL:

Born April 7, 1966, in Chillicothe, OH; daughter of William (a radio announcer) and Charlotte (a high school teacher) Spahr. Ethnicity: "Caucasian."Education: Bard College, B.A., 1988; State University of New York, Buffalo, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Siena College, Albany, NY, visiting assistant professor of English, 1996-97; University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, assistant professor of English, 1997-2003; Mills College, Oakland, CA, associate professor of English, 2003—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Poetry Series award, 1995, forResponse; Fund for Poetry award, 1995; American Council of Learned Societies award, 2005.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Nuclear, Leave Books (Buffalo, NY), 1992.

Choosing Rooms, Texture Press (Norman, OK), 1995.

Testimony, Meow Press (Buffalo, NY), 1995.

Response, Sun and Moon Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1996.

Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism, Explosive Books (New York, NY), 1998.

Live, Duration Press (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2001.

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems,University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2005.

OTHER

(Editor, with Peter Gizzi) Writing from the New Coast: Technique, O-Blek Editions (Stockbridge, MA), 1993.

(Editor, with others) A Poetics of Criticism, Leave Books (Buffalo, NY), 1993.

(Editor, with Claudia Rankine) American Women Poets in the Twenty-first Century, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2001.

Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 2001.

(Editor, with Joan Retallack) Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, Palgrave (New York, NY), 2005.

Editor of journal Chain.

SIDELIGHTS:

Juliana Spahr is both a scholar and a poet. Her poems avoid traditional poetic conventions such as confessionalism and naturalism while exploring the here and now. Spahr's award-winningResponse was inspired by news stories of mob violence, the AIDS epidemic, and lurid headlines about alien abductions. Chicago Review writer Katy Lederer wrote that "Spahr's first full-length collection is in many regards a literary contradiction. For although Spahr evinces an impeccable knowledge of contemporary theory with its penchant for devaluing emotive meaning, her work is in no way a simple exercise in the problematics of language. … Spahr abandons a contemporary poetics obsessed with the accrual of style, insisting instead on a plain anti-lyrical poetic of witness." Mark Wallace, in his review of the book for the Washington Review, called it "one of the best books of American poetry to appear in the last year."

The poems in Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You focus on issues of place, using metaphor and repetition to lead readers into the vivid locations—hotel rooms, a quiet area near a stream, a crowded nightclub—illuminated in Spahr's verse. Praising the work, a Publishers Weekly contributor call the collection "a distinct, ambitious" work that portrays the "tension between the black heart of anger and faith in community."

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poemsconsists of two long poems, "Poem Written after September 11, 2001," and "Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003." Joshua Clover, who reviewed the book in the New York Times Book Review, found that the poems "start with the cellular, the intimate, and reach after the whole shebang. It's political poetry the way it's love poetry; how can it not be, when you go for the everything?" A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that "Spahr returns over and over to ‘the unanswerable questions of political responsibility.’ If she finds few answers, she certainly knows how to ask."

Spahr's nonfiction titles include American Women Poets in the Twenty-first Century, which she edited with Claudia Rankine, and which includes the work of such poets as Rae Armatrout, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, and Harriet Mullen. Each poet is represented by a critical essay, a biography, bibliography, and several new poems, and each adds her own comments. Library Journal contributor Nedra C. Evers noted that Spahr and Rankine "believe that women are major contributors to innovation—a key element in lyric poetry, which is characterized preeminently by the speaker's sharing his or her thoughts and feelings."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, November-December, 1997, Fred Muratori, review of Response, pp. 19-20.

Chicago Review, winter, 1998, Katy Lederer, review of Response, p. 140.

Choice, September, 2001, S. Vander Closter, review ofEverybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, p. 120.

Contemporary Literature, winter, 2003, Jonathan Monroe, review of Everybody's Autonomy, pp. 749-770.

Library Journal, May 15, 2002, Nedra C. Evers, review of American Women Poets in the Twenty-first Century, p. 96.

Los Angeles Times,January 26, 2003, Carol Muske-Dukes, review of American Women Poets in the Twenty-first Century, p. 12.

New York Times Book Review, July 17, 2005, Joshua Clover, review of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems, p. 13.

Publishers Weekly, October 22, 2001, review of Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, p. 72; May 27, 2002, review of American Women Poets in the Twenty-first Century, p. 54.

Washington Review, Mark Wallace, review ofResponse, p. 29.