• 2009/2010 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2001 Emily Clark Balch Award of the Virginia Quarterly Review
• 2000 Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers
• 1997 Finalist, National Poetry Series
• 1996 Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Artists Award
• 1978 Academy of American Poets Prize - University of Virginia
• 1980 Hoyns Fellowship in Poetry - University of Virginia

• "Lullabye", Blackbird, Fall 2003
• "New Year's Eve", Blackbird, Fall 2003
• "The Insomnia of Hildegarde of Bingen", Blackbird, Fall 2003
• "The Ice House"; "Hammock", Cortland Review, November 2007
• "I Consider My Mother's Mind", Slate, July 10, 2007
• "Virginia Woolf's Insomnia", Drunken Boat
• "Mesmer's Insomnia", Drunken Boat
• "Portrait of Insomnia with Giorgio de Chirico", Drunken Boat
• "mortification (2)"; "mortification (3)"; "So"; "Fawn", Free Verse, Spring 2006
• "Love Poem", Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 1986
• "Keats House", Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2005
• 'After John Donne's "To his Mistress Going to Bed"', poets.org

• Blue Venus: Poems, Persea Books, 2004.
• Blind Boy on Skates, Trilobite Chapbooks of the University of Northern Texas Press, 1987.

Anthologies

Criticism

• "God-Hunger Redux", Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2009

Lisa Russ Spaar’s poem "I Consider My Mother's Mind" makes me think of something that that has been suddenly and violently emptied after a long time of neglect, a wallet crammed with too many business cards, gummed encrusted post it notes, receipts, expired credit cards and coupons, small scraps of paper with phone numbers attached to first names whose faces you've forgotten.