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.