Caroline Patterson is the executive director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative. She has published a story collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, a literary anthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart, two children’s books on the natural world, and her work has appeared in anthologies including Montana Noir and Bright Bones. She was awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, Joseph Henry Jackson Prize from the San Francisco Foundation, a Vogelstein Foundation Award, and a Montana Arts Council Fellowship. She lives with her husband, writer Fred Haefele, and her two college-aged children in the Missoula home her great-grandfather built in 1906, with the fireplace on the inside rather than the outside wall, because her great-grandmother said, “she could never spend a night in a house with a mortgage.”
