The former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1978–83), Mary is the author of two books, Leaving Home: Personal Essays (which won the 1998 Association for Mormon Letters personal essay award) and Lowell L. Bennion: Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian (1995). She has also edited a collection of essays, Mormon Women Speak (1982), and written widely on the novelist Virginia Sorensen. Her University of Utah master’s thesis was the first scholarly work by a Mormon on Virginia Sorensen. Her own essays, articles, and poetry have appeared in Dialogue, Exponent II, BYU Studies, Utah Holiday, Deseret News, and in many other books and journals. Mary was raised in Utah but spent the majority of her adult life in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband Charles Bradford and their three children. [from Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems from Mormon Women, 105]
Included in 75 Significant Mormon Poets
Mary L. Bradford
LDS
LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
Poetry on page 156 of the autumn 1996 Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
1930-10-24
University of Utah
Mary Lythgoe Bradford has played a significant role in the development of Mormon literature, particularly as a past editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1976-1982) and as an essayist, biographer, critic, poet, and teacher. She has given important emphasis to the personal essay genre, editing several compilations in that form and publishing a seminal article about the personal essay.
Bradford’s writings have appeared in Dialogue, Exponent II, Sunstone, BYU Studies, BYU Today, the Ensign, the New Era, the Deseret News, Utah Holiday, This People, Commonweal, The John Whitmer History Association Journal, The Utah Historical Quarterly, and The Western Humanities Review.
Her essays have appeared in the book-length collections, A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars (ed. Philip Barlow) and A Time to Weep and a Time to Sing: Faith Journeys of Women Scholars of Religion (ed. by Mary Jo Meadow and Carole A. Rayburn).
Her poems have appeared in two anthologies: Where Feelings Flower (ed. by Barbara Smith and Shirley Thomas), and Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems (ed. by Eugene England and Dennis Clark). (See the bibliography below)
