Susan Barbour is a poet-scholar, artist, and perfumer who works across mediums to explore hidden forms of human connection—both with ourselves and with our natural environments.

A self-taught visual artist who began as an artists’ model, Susan learned life drawing “on both sides of the easel” and has exhibited her experimental hair drawings, intaglio prints, and neon artworks at galleries and museums in Los Angeles, New York City, and Europe.

Her poetry and essays have appeared in literary magazines including The Paris Review, Catapult, Five Dials, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Oxford Poetry, and her scholarship has been published in academic journals such as Textual Practice, Transatlantica, and The Oxford Review of English Studies. Her first novel, REMEMBER ME TO XANADU, recounts her experience temping on Wall Street in 2008—in the days following the sudden death of her father and leading up to the global financial crisis. Structured around the 2008 Merriam-Webster word-of-the-day calendar, a gift her father gave her the last time she saw him, this book chronicles a young poet’s daily quest to find meaning in the wake of loss and in the context of turbo-capitalism.

Susan’s international lectures, wine tastings, human body odor workshops, olfactory art installations, and performances invite audiences to reclaim the power of their innate olfactory intelligence. An independent perfumer, she creates perfumes made to blend with—rather than disguise—the body’s natural musk. She has also created a collection of environmental perfumes inspired by “scent walks” through endangered ecosystems around the world.

Susan earned a B.A. in English from Dartmouth, an M.A. in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and a DPhil in English Literature from Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar and The Somerville College Graduate Scholar in the Humanities. She also holds the Level 4 Diploma from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust and is a certified French Wine Scholar.

She has been the recipient of fellowships from The Beinecke Library at Yale, The Bogliasco Foundation, The Dora Maar House/Brown Foundation, The Huntington Library, The Jentel Artist Residency, The Rothermere American Studies Institute, The Siena Art Institute, Castello di Potentino, and The Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles. She has lectured at Johns Hopkins, École Polytechnique, and Merton College, Oxford and held research positions at Columbia University and Caltech.

She currently divides her time between New York City, Los Angeles, and Europe.