Susan Meyers, PhD

A native Washingtonian, Meyers graduated with her BA from Seattle University in 1999, where she was a member of the University Honors Program, majoring in English with a minor in sociology. Alongside earning an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in composition and rhetoric from the University of Arizona, she later spent several years living in Latin America before coming back to teach at her undergraduate alma mater. Meyers’ fiction and nonfiction have nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have been supported by grants from 4Culture, Artist Trust, Jack Straw, and Squaw Valley, as well as several national artist residency centers, including Hedgebrook, Jentel, Hambidge, and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her novel, Failing the Trapeze, won the Nilsen Award, and other creative work has recently appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, Per Contra, Calyx, Dogwood, and The Minnesota Review. In addition, Meyers’ scholarship, including a field study on education in rural Mexico, Del Otro Lado: Literacy and Migration Across the U.S.-Mexico Border, has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of University Women; and she has become an international leader in writing studies, having offered keynote addresses at conferences and workshops in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At Seattle University, she enjoys extending these interests in global and comparative writing contexts in the classroom through courses in narrative craft, travel writing, grant and professional writing, women’s voices, oral history, and writing for social change.