Juliana Spahr Biography

Juliana Spahr (born 1969) is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring.
Both Spahr's critical and scholarly studies, i.e., Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), and her poetry have shown Spahr's commitment to fostering a "value of reading" as a communal, democratic, open process. Her work therefore "distinguishes itself because she writes poems for which her critical work calls." In addition to teaching and writing poetry, Spahr is also an active editor. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response (1996).
Born and raised in Chillicothe, Ohio, Spahr received her BA from Bard College in Languages and Literatures and her PhD from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York in English. She has taught at Siena College (1996-7), the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1997–2003), and Mills College (2003-). With Jena Osman, she has edited the arts journal Chain since 2003.