Paradise Close with Lisa Russ Spaar with Lena Moses-Schmitt

Acclaimed poet-turned-novelist Lisa Russ Spaar celebrates the paperback launch of her lyrical, decades-spanning novel. In conversation with poet Lena Moses-Schmitt, followed by a signing.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade—fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support—finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise’s struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the ’70s.

Decades later, sixty-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he’s nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with a captivating artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What’s become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and inexorability of change.

These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld.

Lisa Russ Spaar has published thirteen books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and a novel, Paradise Close. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and a Horace W. Goldsmith National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professorship appointment. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere, and she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where she founded and directed the Area Program in Poetry Writing for twenty years and for many years directed the Creative Writing Program. You can find more on her website, and Instagram.

Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her debut poetry collection True Mistakes was selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and is forthcoming from University of Arkansas Press in March 2025. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, The Believer, Ecotone, The Rumpus, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York.

Host or Publisher Rizzoli Bookstore