Juliana Spahr

Born in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1966, Juliana Spahr recieved a BA from Bard College and PhD from SUNY Buffalo.

She is the author of Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow Press, 2011); This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005); Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); and Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996), winner of the National Poetry Series Award.

Spahr is also the author of Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (University of Alabama Press, 2001).

As editor, she has published a number of critical works, including A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011), co-edited with Stephanie Young; Poetry and Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006), co-edited with Joan Retallack; and American Women Poets in the Twenty-first Century (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), co-edited with Claudia Rankine. From 1993 to 2003, Spahr co-edited the arts journal Chain, which she co-founded with Jena Osman.

About Spahr's work, the poet Anne Waldman has said, "By listing, by naming, the atrocities—the harrowing stats, the scary particulars—in our world-at-endless-war, we might at least exert control over our sanity and extend our mind and compassion to others. It is a connected universe as Spahr so forecfully reminds us."

In 2009, she recieved the Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

She currently lives in Berkeley, California.