About
TODD ROBERT PETERSEN lives in Cedar City, Utah, with his wife and three children. A graduate of the University of Oregon, Northern Arizona University, and Oklahoma State, Petersen is a professor of English at Southern Utah University, where he teaches creative writing and film studies courses. In 2018, Counterpoint Press released a novel in stories called It Needs to Look Like We Tried and Picnic in the Ruins, a dark comedy about antiquities theft set on the Utah/Arizona border, came out in 2021.
Featured Work
Picnic in the Ruins
A madcap caper across the RV-strewn vacation lands of southern Utah meets a meditation on mythology, authenticity, the ethics of preservation, and one nagging question: "who owns the past?" Anthropologist Sophia Shepard is researching the impact of tourism on cultural sites in a remote national monument on the Utah-Arizona border when she unexpectedly crosses paths with two small-time criminals. The Ashdown brothers were hired to steal maps from a "collector" of Native American artifacts, but instead of delivering as promised, the brothers are out to strike it rich. But their ineptitude has alerted the local sheriff to their presence—and forced their employer, to send a fixer to clean up their mess before it upsets her machinations. Sheriff Dalton, following the Ashdowns' trail, soon discovers he's not dealing with a simple burglary—and any hope the sheriff had for peace and quiet is long gone.
