Mary Spooner

Mary Spooner received an M.A. in English from the University of Southern Mississippi and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Before joining UCLA Writing Programs, she taught First-Year Writing and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. Her composition courses focus on rhetorical flexibility, foundational research skills, and practical grammar. Prioritizing transparency and open classroom dialogue, she and her students interrogate the evolving norms of academic writing, address writing anxiety and procrastination, and embrace linguistic diversity. Above all, she hopes her students will stay curious. Mary is curious about language poetry, urban wildlife, America’s relationship to public space, food in the Deep South, and the cult of reality television. She is currently working on a first collection of poems.