Since its founding in 1976, the Association for Mormon Letters has kept conversations about Mormon literature and creativity going. If you love books, we’d love to have you join the conversation. On Tuesday, October 19 at 6:30 pm MT, we’ll hold a Zoom meeting for anyone interested in volunteering on one of our initiatives for 2021-2022. Come to hear about what we have planned, ask questions, and let us know what you’re interested in helping with.
RSVP here if you’d like us to send you the meeting link.
Hope to see you there! We’re currently looking for help in six areas:
Awards
Contact: Andrew Hall, andrewrhall@gmail.com
Description: The Association for Mormon Letters Awards honor the best in literary writing by, for, or about Latter-day Saints and cultural Mormons. Each year, awards coordinators work to identify titles in a wide range of literary genres for a panel of judges to review and consider for a shortlist of finalists and to recognize as a winner. The awards serve not only to recognize a work in the moment, but to help preserve our memory of key works in the field’s history.
Volunteer Needs: We welcome volunteers willing to identify eligible works, as well as volunteers with experience in a genre who are willing to serve on a committee, request books from publishers, read texts, then help choose finalists and winners.
Reviews
Contact: Andrew Hamilton, ahamilton@csi.edu
Description: What is going on right now in Mormon Literature? The Association for Mormon Letters does its best to keep track of publications and write timely online reviews of new work. Reviews tend to be brief (300-1300 words) and focus on reader experience.
Volunteer Needs: People who like free books and respond to the content and describe their reactions.
Irreantum
Contact: Theric Jepson, irreantum.editor AT gmail DOT com
Description: AML’s literary magazine, Irreantum, is an important outlet for Mormon literary writing. Writers can submit work to an open call, or write for one of the themed special issues our guest editors create each year.
Volunteer Needs:
- Irreantum is working to pay its contributors. We ran a successful Kickstarter earlier this year and are planning to launch a Patreon. People with better ideas on how to make money are welcome!
- We welcome proposals from potential guest editors—guidelines for guest editors are found on the submissions-guidelines page.
- I would love to get the Archives page updated. Most of the hard work has already been done, I just need help doing the grunt work of making the pages and inputting the code. It’s pretty straightforward, just mildly time-consuming.
- We would love to have better SEO and such yet no idea how to do so.
- So…Theric’s doing fine at managing our Twitter account. He’s terrible at the Facebook account. If someone’s interested in taking that over, great! And if you have other social-media ideas, please jump in.
100 Important Works List—Promotion
Contact: William Morris
Description: Over the past year, AML has been developing a list of 100 Important Works in the history of Mormon Literature. We hope that the list will help people find a starting place as they read and study Mormon literature. In 2022, we’ll be working to find creative ways to share the list and invite people to discover the books it contains.
Volunteer Needs: We are looking for people interested in helping coordinate and copy edit the blurbs that will be included alongside each work that makes the list and/or help with promotional efforts through traditional and social media and other efforts.
Conference Planning
Contact: Melissa Leilani Larson,
Description: Eugene England was a founding member of the Association for Mormon Letters, an early AML president, and the founder of the first Mormon Studies program. At our June 2022 Conference, we’d like to review the state of the field, with special focus on England’s vision and on developments in the two decades since his death.
Volunteer Needs: Help with conference planning, logistics, and communications
Literature in Mormon Studies Survey
Contact: James Goldberg, james.goldberg@gmail.com
Description: At the 2022 Conference, we plan to share a report on the uses of literature within the larger academic discipline of Mormon Studies. Which programs use Mormon literature in coursework? Which scholars are studying it? What resources are available to programs that would like to do more with literature as a lens on Mormon/Latter-day Saint experience?
Volunteer Needs: Help selecting survey questions and following up with programs and scholars.
Wikipedia Editing
Contact: Rachel Helps, rachel_helps@byu.edu; see also our Discord channel
Description: Help to select and edit Wikipedia pages relating to Mormon letters.
Volunteer needs: Compiling lists of pages that need work and new pages that would probably pass Wikipedia’s notability guidelines; compiling sources; summarizing sources; linking between pages to increase discoverability; copyediting and categorizing pages.
Featured Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash