Caroline Patterson

Caroline Patterson's novel, The Stone Sister, won the 2020 Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence and debuts in September 2021. She is also the author of Ballet at the Moose Lodge, a literary anthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart and two children's books on the natural world. Her short fiction and essays have been published in journals including Epoch, Outside, Southwest Review, and Seventeen, and has been included in anthologies including A Million Acres, Montana Noir, Bright Bones, and The New Montana Story. A graduate of the University of Montana creative writing program in fiction, she was awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, the Joseph Henry Jackson Prize from the San Francisco Foundation, a Vogelstein Foundation Award, and the Montana Arts Council Fellowship. She received residencies at Ucross, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and at Ragdale (forthcoming). She is currently the executive director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative, which places writers to teach creative writing in more than 38 elementary schools in rural, urban, and tribal schools across western Montana.

She lives with her husband, writer Fred Haefele, in the Missoula home her great-grandfather built in 1906, which he built on the banks of the Clark Fork River where, he told his five-year-old son back in Chicago, they could throw stones in the water and the family could come and “cut out all worrying.” Her two grown children, Phoebe and Tobin, visit on Sundays for dinner and laundry.

For more information, see carolineepatterson.org