Patricia Waters is a native of Nashville, Tennessee. After graduating from Memphis State with a double major in History and English, her first jobs were on archaeological digs in England and Norway.
Following study and travel in Europe, she returned to the U.S. to earn a Master’s in English and to pursue careers in journalism and teaching.
While at Tennessee Wesleyan College, a Pew grant funded her attendance at several prestigious writing conferences and reinforced her determination to pursue a Ph.D. and a career in writing. She earned a Ph.D. in English from UT in 1998. Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Louisville Review, and the Southern Poetry Review, among others.