Bio

Dayna Patterson is a recovering Mormon, a textile artist, and an amateur fungophile. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Bellingham Review, Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Hotel Amerika, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Passages North, POETRY, Sugar House Review, Thrush, Zone 3, Western Humanities Review, Whale Road Review, and others. Two of her poems appear in Best Spiritual Literature, 2023.

She is the author of If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020), winner of the Association for Mormon Letters Poetry Award. It’s a hybrid collection of poetry and lyric essay in which Patterson explores her Mormon ancestry and upbringing, her mother’s coming out, and the her eventual apostasy. Her second book, a poetry collection entitled O Lady, Speak Again (Signature Books 2023), explores characters from Shakespeare’s plays—with “irreverent bardolatry” and a Post-Mormon feminist twist. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019).

Patterson’s third book, Our Lady of Thread, is forthcoming from Signature Books in 2027. It weaves together three main threads: 1) poems in the voice of God the Mother; 2) prayer poems in the Catholic “Our Lady” tradition; and 3) poems about mothering kids in the Anthropocene. Our Lady of Thread is a hybrid collection that pushes the boundaries of what a poetry collection can be; it includes embroidered collages, stitched poems, and a QR code that links readers to a videopoem.

Patterson earned a BA in English with a minor in French from Utah State University (2004), an MA in Literature from Texas State-San Marcos (2008), and an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University (2017), where she served as the managing editor of Bellingham Review. Patterson co-edited Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry and founded the online literary journal Psaltery & Lyre, a space dedicated to publishing literature at the intersection of faith and doubt. She has also served as the poetry editor for Exponent II Magazine.

Patterson was a co-winner of the 2019 #DignityNotDetention poetry prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky, and she has been a Sustainable Arts Fellow at Mineral School Artist’s Residency.