About Jodi Varon

Born and raised in Colorado, Jodi Varon has worked as a free-lance journalist, an adobe brick mason, a salmon cannery crew member in southeastern Alaska, an agricultural worker, and an English as a Second Language Instructor in Taichung City, Taiwan before returning to school to earn her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Montana and her PhD in American Literature at Ohio University. She is a professor emeritus of English and Writing at Eastern Oregon University where she has taught since 1988.

Varon and her colleague and spouse David Axelrod founded and co-directed the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at EOU. Varon was an editor-in-chief and later a contributing editor of the magazine basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts (formerly Calapooya), winner of an award to publishers from Literary Arts. Varon also served as a writer in residence at Whitman College and a visiting writer in residence at Signal Fire Wide Open Studios.

As a visiting professor of American Literature and Culture at the Ludwigsburg University of Education in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, from 2005-2015 Varon witnessed seismic shifts in Germans' discourse and memorialization of the devastation of the Holocaust. She was present for the renovation and rededication of the Synagogue Memorial in Ludwigsburg in 2014, the record of which she describes in her most recent book, Your Eyes Will Be My Window: Essays.

Varon is the author of two memoirs presented as linked essays, Your Eyes Will Be My Window (University of Georgia Press 2023), an exploration of friendship's bonds in the wake of emigration, family secrets, and the Holocaust. Her first collection, Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father (University of Missouri Press 2006), was a WILLA Award Finalist from Women Writing the West and eulogizes the gambling obsession of Varon's father and his romance with Spain's Golden Age.

Also a translator, Varon's versions of the Chinese Tang Dynasty renegade poet Li He are collected in The Rock's Cold Breath: Selected Poems of Li He (Ice River Press), and her translations with Monica Chen of the legendary Chinese herbal doctor Ing Hay and his business associate, Lung On of the Kam Wah Chung Mercantile Company of late 19th and early 20th century John Day, Oregon appear in the anthology Talking on Paper: Oregon Letters and Diaries (Oregon State University Press).

Varon also writes about the contributions of Chinese doctors, entrepreneurs, miners, and laborers to the establishment of several towns throughout central and eastern Oregon in the Oregon Encyclopedia and for many years presented “A View of Gold Mountain: Letters from the Kam Wah Chung Trading Co., John Day, Oregon” to libraries and community centers throughout Oregon as part of the Oregon Chautauqua Program for the Oregon Council for the Humanities.

A writer of both non-fiction and fiction, Jodi Varon's prose publications include stories, essays, articles and reviews in Boulevard: Journal of Contemporary Writing, Rock and Sling: A Journal of Witness, WomenArts Quarterly, New Letters, The Western Humanities Review, the Oregon Encyclopedia, The High Plains Literary Review, Zone 3, the Northwest Review, The Seattle Review, Western American Literature, and several other journals and magazines. Varon's fiction has been anthologized in Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Stories by Women (The Crossing Press) and Texas Told 'Em: Gambling Stories (Ink Brush Press).

Her translations of Li He's poems from the Quan Tangshi, The Complete Tang Poetry appear in several publications, among them Bibliophilos, Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, The Colorado Review, Sequoia, and Translation: The Journal of Literary Translation.

Jodi Varon now makes her home near Missoula, Montana where she and her husband tend a small native plant nursery. She is at work on a book about gardening, longing, and diasporas.