Sugar House Review presents Dayna Patterson, author of If Mother Braids a Waterfall.

Register and attend via Zoom: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtdeiuqDIpE9A6ex1gKjFfq8p-SNJ8Ay6_

In her debut collection of poetry and lyric essay, Patterson grapples with a patriarchal and polygamous heritage. After learning about her mother’s bisexuality, Patterson befriends doubt while simultaneously feeling the urge to unearth a feminist theology, one that envisions God the Mother taking pride of place at the banquet table.

Dayna Patterson’s creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, POETRY, North American Review, Western Humanities Review, Sugar House Review, Zone 3, 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’s mother’s coming out as bisexual, and the author’s eventual apostasy from the faith she was raised in. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019).

Patterson is a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry and the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal 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.

This event is made possible with support from Sugar House Review and Utah Humanities.