Rate My Professor Susan Varnot

Susan Varnot is an Associate Teaching Professor of Writing Studies at the University of California, Merced, in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Poetry from Arizona State University and a BA in English with focal areas in literature and creative writing from Skidmore College. Hailing from Massachusetts, Varnot has taught in diverse cultural and geographical contexts, including New York, Arizona, Spain, Florida, the Jicarilla Apache Nation in New Mexico, and California, prior to joining UC Merced in 2007.

Since her arrival, Varnot has been instrumental in the Writing Studies Major and Minor, founding the UC Merced Creative Writing Collaboratorium, a multi-campus conference, and curating the Write! Look! Listen! reading and workshop series. She participates in general education, assessment and review processes, advises the UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal The Vernal Pool, and supports student clubs, events, and campus initiatives. Her teaching and research interests include empowering pedagogy and praxis, creative writing, interdisciplinarity, creativity studies, poetry and poetics, multimodal communication, memory, language and identity, the function and reliability of narrative in internal and external contexts, collaborative and antiracist approaches, and the role of AI large language models in creative writing and creativity. Varnot's poems have been published in journals such as Arts and Letters, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and featured in the anthology A Face to Meet the Faces: Contemporary Persona Poetry, receiving national recognition. She is affiliated with the University Honors Program in Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies and the Karen Merritt Writing Program.