Neylan McBaine: Mormon Writer
Neylan McBaine is a marketer, blogger, columnist, author, and founder of The Mormon Women Project. She is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
McBaine is the daughter of John McBaine and Ariel Bybee. She was born and reared in New York City and attended Juilliard during high school as a pianist. She continued to study piano at Yale University, where she earned a degree in English. She has been published in Newsweek, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Segullah, Meridian Magazine, BustedHalo.com, and the Washington Post’s religion blog. She is the author of a collection of personal essays, How to Be a Twenty-First Century Pioneer Woman (2010). She also authored Sisters Abroad: Interviews from the Mormon Women Project (2013), Women at Church (2014), and Pioneering the Vote (2020). She writes columns for Patheos.com and PowerofMoms.com
She is the founder and editor in chief of The Mormon Women Project, a digital library of interviews with Latter-day Saint women throughout the world. Her work there led her to an invitation from Bonneville Communications to work on the Mormon.org and I’m a Mormon campaigns. She co-founded Better Days 2020, a nonprofit that popularizes Utah women's history through education, legislation, and art. She served as CEO of the organization, preparing Utah to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Utah being the first place a woman cast a legal ballot in the modern United States.
McBaine is a brand strategist at Bonneville Communications with responsibility for research and strategic planning. In addition to her writing skills, she brought to that job seven years of marketing in Silicon Valley. She lives with her husband, Elliot Smith, and three daughters in Salt Lake City.
