Suzannah Russ Spaar /
August 28, 2019
Baby Picture

About The Author

Suzannah Russ Spaar

Suzannah Russ Spaar is a poet from Charlottesville, VA. She received her MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is a teacher at an all-girls middle school. She is the co-author of the chapbook, Undone in Scarlet (Tammy, 2019). Read more of her work at Luna Luna, The Boiler, and elsewhere.


From an early age, I understood the world through fairy tales and myth. They tap into primal human forces and are far from mere fantasy. Transformation, metamorphoses—the engines of these tales—are at the heart of experience: the child becoming adult, becoming other, the other falling in love with yet another, that love finding a voice. The evil sister, the frog creeping into an open palm: these are the images which shaped my childhood. They suggest that a gesture can generate magic, that a detail contains a world, and are at the heart of what I write.