About the Lamont Poetry Program
The Lamont Fund, established in 1982 by Corliss Lamont, Class of 1920, and Jacquelyn Thomas, former Academy Librarian, supports the Academy Library's Lamont Poetry Series. Two poets are invited each year to give readings of their poetry and to attend English classes.
The first Lamont Poet, on April 27, 1983, was Jorge Luis Borges. He has been followed by more than 50 others, ranging from Denise Levertov and Seamus Heaney to Yusef Komunyakaa and C.K. Williams.
Each visiting poet is photographed and asked to present the library with a manuscript poem. These are then framed and hung in the Special Collections department on the fourth floor of the library.
The Lamont Fund also support the Lamont Younger Poets program. See our Lamont Younger Poets page for more information.
2025 - 2026 Lamont Poetry Series
Lisa Russ Spaar - November 5, 2025
About Lisa Russ Spaar
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of six acclaimed collections of poetry, including Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (2021), Orexia (2017), Vanitas, Rough (2013), Satin Cash (2008), Blue Venus (2004), and Glass Town (1999); plus two poetry chapbooks, Blind Boy on Skates (1986) and Cellar (1983),and a novel, Paradise Close (2022).
She is also the author of The Hide-and-Seek Muse:Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (2013) — collection of poetry history and criticism — editor of four poetry anthologies, and she was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors and awards. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the MFA program.
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Tim Seibles - February 18, 2026
About Tim Seibles
Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award, and One Turn Around The Sun (2017). His most recent collection, Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems, was released in 2022. His poems has been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
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