Life

She was raised in Circleville. She graduated from Vassar College

Vassar College

Vassar College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. The Vassar campus comprises over and more than 100 buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International,...

 and Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

.

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

Goucher College

Goucher College is a private, co-educational, liberal arts college located in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson in unincorporated Baltimore County, Maryland, on a 287 acre campus. The school has approximately 1,475 undergraduate students studying in 31 majors and six interdisciplinary...

 where she holds a Chair for Distinguished Achievement.

Awards

Spires has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship

Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship

The Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship is given annually to a U.S.-born poet to spend one year outside North America in a country the recipient feels will most advance his or her work....

, a Whiting Writers' Award

Whiting Writers' Award

The Whiting Writers' Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. The award is sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and has been presented since 1985. As of 2007, winners receive US $50,000.-External links:**...

, a Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...

, 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.

Edited

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

External links

• Audio: Elizabeth Spires reads You Have Flown to the Dangerous Country from The Wave-Maker (2008)
• Audio: Elizabeth Spires reads S n a i l from The Wave-Maker (2008)
• Interview: Elizabeth Spires Interview (2010) from KeepWriting.org