Todd Robert Petersen

Todd Robert Petersen is the author of short stories, essays, poems as well as two books of fiction. He collection of writings, Long After Dark, is regarded in the Mormon Arts community as a model for what Latter-day Saint literature should be.[1] His poems and fiction have garnered several awards, including the AWP Intro Award, the Marilyn Brown Novel Award, Utah Arts Award, and Sunstone Foundation awards. His novel, Rift, won the Association for Mormon Letters Award for best novel of 2009 and was honored with a Marilyn Brown Award.

Petersen founded "The Sugar Beet", which was an online Latter-ay Saint satire zine (comparable to "The Onion").

He earned his bachelor’s degree in film from the University of Oregon, his master’s in creative writing from Northern Arizona University, and his doctorate degree in English with an emphasis in Fictional Rhetoric and Critical Theory from Oklahoma State University.

Petersen is a professor of English and taught in the English Department at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah, from 2001 to 2013, where he is currently director of Project-Based Learning. In 2014 he was one of eleven writers selected by the Utah Arts Council to represent arts in Utah education in the Change Leader Program.

He is from Moses Lake, Washington. He and his wife are the parents of three children.