Bio

Dayna Patterson is a Thea-curious recovering Mormon, a textile artist, amateur fungophile, and macrophotography enthusiast. 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.

She is the author of If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020), a hybrid collection of poetry and lyric essay that explores her Mormon ancestry and upbringing, her mother’s coming out, and the author’s eventual apostasy from the faith she was raised in. 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 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 earned a BA in English 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. 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.