She was raised in Circleville. She graduated from Vassar College and Johns Hopkins University.

Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The New Criterion, The Paris Review, and in many other literary magazines and anthologies, She lives in Baltimore with her husband and her daughter and is a professor of English at Goucher College where she holds a Chair for Distinguished Achievement.

Spires has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Ohioana Book Awards, and the Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association.

Poetry

Children's books

Edited

• The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticism and Occasional Prose by Josephine Jacobsen.

Anthologies