Dayna Patterson

Dayna Patterson is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019), and a full-length collection of lyric prose and poetry, If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, The Fourth River, Hotel Amerika, Mom Egg Review, North American Review, POETRY, Passages North, Rock & Sling, Ruminate, So to Speak, Sugar House Review, Sunstone, Sweet Lit, Tupelo Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Zone 3, and others. She is a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry and the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online journal publishing literature at the intersection of faith and doubt.

Patterson earned her BA in English with a French minor at Utah State University (2004), her MA in Literature from Texas State-San Marcos (2008), and her MFA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University (2017), where she served as the managing editor of Bellingham Review.

Patterson has been a Sustainable Arts Fellow at Mineral School Artist’s Residency and has received multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. In 2018, her hybrid piece “Contents” was a Best of the Net finalist. Her poem “God the Mother Speaks of Trees” was awarded an honorable mention in the 2019 Janet B. McCabe poetry contest. She won first place in the A Mother Here: Art and Poetry Contest, and she won first place in Segullah’s 2017 and 2019 poetry contests. In 2019, her poem “God the Mother Speaks of Cosmolatry” was a semifinalist in Tupelo Quarterly’s poetry contest, her poem “Our Lady of Lengthening Days” was a finalist in Sweet Lit’s poetry contest, and her poem “God the Mother Speaks of Matriphagy” was an Orison Poetry Prize finalist. Along with her co-editors, Tyler Chadwick and Martin Pulido, she was honored with a Special Award in Publishing from the Association of Mormon Letters.

Patterson was born and raised in Logan, Utah.