Making the Acquaintance of Eliza R. Snow: An Interview with Her Biographer, Jill Mulvay Derr

Volume 59:3 (2020) - This is half of an interview conducted by Cherry B. Silver on August 8, 2019, in the BYU Studies offices. The other half will be published in a later issue. Many thanks to Laurel Barlow for transcribing the recording.

When, as a young woman living in the Boston area, Jill Mulvay Derr heard a lecture by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher about Eliza R. Snow, she immediately felt a great desire to become involved in researching historical Latter-day Saint women. She got her first job as a researcher in the Church History Department at Church headquarters, locating and compiling the poetry of Eliza R. Snow; four decades later she retired from the department as a senior research historian. In her long and prolific career, Derr has also pursued research, writing, and teaching at Brigham Young University in the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, where she eventually served as associate director and then director, and also as an associate professor of Church history. She was president of the Mormon History Association and helped organize the Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team. Derr has published a number of landmark books, including Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints (with Kenneth W. Godfrey and Audrey M. Godfrey); Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society (with Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Janath Russell Cannon); Eliza R. Snow: The Complete Poetry (with Karen Lynn Davidson); The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History (with Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow); and The Life and Faith of Eliza R. Snow (with Karen Lynn Davidson). Throughout her career, she has studied the life and contributions of Eliza R. Snow and is writing a scholarly biography on this important figure in Church history.