USU folklore alum Millie Tullis has been awarded the Don Yoder Prize from the Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section of the American Folklore Society for a chapter in her dissertation titled “Comfort, Counsel, Money, and Livestock: Mormon Women’s Divination Communities.”

The prize is named in honor of folklorist and religious studies scholar, Don Yoder (1921-2015), professor of Folklore and Folklife and Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Millie says, “This section of my thesis examines the larger community contexts of Mormon women’s divination in Utah. Mormon women across Utah practiced divination for their communities. Mormon men and women went to peepstone women and other diviners for a variety of reasons, but these reasons generally were connected to gendered concerns. This thesis
considers how these diviner women functioned in their Mormon community contexts, arguing that divination and revelation are social, community-based practices, and more widespread than previously documented. Both of these papers drew heavily from USU's archives, specifically the Fife collection, and the oral history interviews I conducted as a student with the help of Dr.
Jeannie Thomas.”


Millie was also awarded the 2024 Helen Papanikolas Award from the Utah Historical Society for a chapter in her folklore thesis, "'The Peepstone woman in Logan Told Him': A History of Elvine Petersen and the Logan Peepstone Lady.”

“This chapter examines stories of the ‘Logan peepstone woman,’ Elvine Petersen, who was locally well-known during her life for her ability to give advice and counsel using peepstones and coffee grounds,” notes Millie. “This thesis is reflexive in its attempt to study a woman who left no sources of her own behind, and whose life has only been framed by other voices, but who gathered enough attention to generate a robust body of local and family folklore.”

Millie’s new chapbook Dream with Teeth has been published by Ghost City Press. Dream with Teeth explores gendered violence through fairy tale variants, motifs, and dreams. The poems in it were first published in Dialogist, Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Gingerbread House Literary Magazine. This project was an offshoot of Millie’s MFA thesis at George Mason University that she put together while doing her MA at USU. The cover art was done by USU English Department alum Dayna Patterson.