Boyd Petersen is the husband of Zina; the father of Mary, Christian, Nathanael, and Andrew; a teacher at UVU and BYU; and the author of essays, one biography, and loads of academic death prose. He is a fifth-generation Utah valley resident. He attended Provo schools; served an LDS mission to Paris, France; and graduated from Brigham Young University with a double major in French and International Relations. He spent the first chapter of his life employed on Capitol Hill, as an intern for former Rep. Wayne Owens, a staff assistant with the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and a senior information specialist with the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress. He simultaneously worked part-time on an M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. His thesis looked at literary approaches to Genesis 1-3, the Adam & Eve narrative. He began the second chapter of his life–as a college teacher–after moving back to Utah in 1995. He has taught literature and composition classes for the English department at UVU and the Honors program at BYU, as well as introduction to humanities and ethics for the UVU Philosophy and Humanities department. In 2006, he was awarded the adjunct faculty excellence award from UVU. He subsequently completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Utah, writing his dissertation on literary creation narratives in 19th century literature. His dissertation was later published by an obscure academic publishing house in Germany. 
He currently serves as the Program Coordinator for Mormon Studies at UVU and as past-president of the Association for Mormon Letters.
