Short Bio

Jon Michael Varese has been working at the intersection of literature, education, and technology for nearly three decades, and has understood that words have the power to transform lives ever since his grandmother gave him his first book.

As a critically acclaimed novelist and internationally recognized scholar of Dickens and Victorian Literature, he has spoken to audiences around the world about the healing and transformative power of literature. As a technologist, he has been involved in a number of groundbreaking web, database, and CRM technologies, and has led international teams of technical writers for Fortune 500 companies.

He maintains that words and the limitless connections that they create are not just essential to our being, but sacred.

Long Bio

Jon Michael Varese has been working at the intersection of literature, education, and technology for nearly three decades, and has understood that words have the power to transform lives ever since his grandmother gave him his first book. It was under her loquat tree, in the enveloping heat of his native Miami, that his journey with literature, and his deep belief in its power to heal and transform, was born.

Jon graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in English Literature, and went on to study Victorian Literature (M.A., Ph.D.) at the University of California Santa Cruz. While still in graduate school, a series of problems that he could not afford to fix (including a flat tire, a broken printer, and a dead phone — yes, a land line back then!) forced him to think about supplementing his teaching income. So he took on work as a technical writer in the interesting place that people were starting to call “Silicon Valley.” He learned HTML, wrote early database documentation, and built web experiences for both commercial and academic audiences, including the Our Mutual Friend Scholarly Pages — one of the first digital humanities projects ever to appear on the internet.

Jon's involvement in the technical world eventually led to a position at the Salesforce Foundation, where he wrote for and ultimately oversaw all documentation for Salesforce's Nonprofit, Education, and Philanthropic CRM technologies. Over the years, his "compassionate approach" to technical documentation — an approach that conversely puts human connection at the center of even the most "mechanical" writing — grew to influence many other teams and verticals. Jon now oversees a global team of writers spread across four continents, and continues to insist that great communication of any kind has the power to change people’s lives.

Whether he is speaking to the general public about the continued importance of classic texts like Jane Eyre and Frankenstein, advocating through technical documentation for the building of a better world through technology, or telling stories about loss and survival in his supernatural gothic novels (The Spirit Photographer, The Company), one thing has remained constant for Jon during his nearly thirty years in writing and education: the belief that words and the limitless connections that they create are not just essential to our being, but sacred.