We are pleased to announce the 2022 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Creative Nonfiction, Criticism (Long-form), and Criticism (Short-form). The final awards will be announced and presented on April 29, as part of the 2023 Association for Mormon Letters Virtual Conference.
In previous years, we have had one annual award for Criticism, a category for critical works about art, including literature, film, music, and visual art. But the judges this year decided to award two criticism awards, “Long-form” for book-length works, and “Short-form” for article-length works.
We will be announcing the other category finalists over the coming week. The finalists and winners are chosen by juries of authors, academics, and critics. The announcements include book blurbs and author biographies, usually adapted from the author and publisher websites.
Creative Nonfiction
Phyllis Barber. The Precarious Walk: Essays from Sand and Sun. Torrey House Press
From a backwoods church in Arkansas to the disappeared town of St. Thomas, buried beneath the waters of Lake Mead, award-winning essayist Phyllis Barber travels roads both internal and external, reflecting upon place and perspective, ambition and loss in The Precarious Walk. As a child growing up in the Mojave Desert, she witnesses the massive power of the Hoover Dam and a fiery rip in the sky from the Nevada Test Site. As an adult, Barber searches for meaning through music, movement, and human connection, examining her Mormon upbringing, the profound ways people and landscape impact one another, and the sudden loss of her first child with open-ended honesty. Barber’s distinctly feminine voice expands upon the literature of the West alongside Ellen Meloy and Terry Tempest Williams, with seeking and questioning at the heart of this deeply felt collection. In the spirit of Flannery O’Connor and David James Duncan, Barber adds a deeply generous and–true to her high-desert roots–down-to-earth voice to the illumination of human experience.
Phyllis Barber writes about the West, the desert, the Mormons who played a significant role in settling the West and creating the person she’s become, and about matters of the spirit with its familiar and unfamiliar reaches. rHer previous books include the short story collections The School of Love (1990) and Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination (1999), the novels And the Desert Shall Blossom (1991) and The Desert Between Us (2020), the children’s book Legs: The Story of a Giraffe (1991) and the memoirs How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (1992-AML Award winner), Raw Edges: A Memoir (2010), and To The Mountain: One Mormon Woman’s Search For Spirit (2014). In 2016 she was presented with the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters.
Michael Hicks. Wineskin: Freakin’ Jesus in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Signature Books
Mormonism begins with a memoir: Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove until two-thirds of the Godhead appear and promise him a quixotic religious renown. Since then, the faith Smith birthed has raised up memoirs as gritty as Parley P. Pratt’s Autobiography or as luminously sarcastic as Elna Baker’s New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. Grafted somewhere into those works’ genealogy comes this boyhood memoir, rooted not in Mormonism but in the Protestantism of American suburbia and the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970s, then in, out, and back into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hicks’s story is a tale studded with awkward episodes of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not necessarily in that order), along with alcohol, sci-fi, theft, radical politics, cartooning, halfway houses, and the musical avant-garde. The one constant is the brooding figure of Jesus Christ behind Hicks’s various personal reclamations and metamorphoses, often via methods admittedly off the books. While many readers know Hicks as a Mormon academic—thirty-five years a professor of music at Brigham Young University—Wineskin excavates the path, from boyhood to a PhD, that led him toward a faith that is both primitively Christian and highmindedly Mormon.
Michael Hicks taught music at Brigham Young University for thirty-five years. He is a composer, performer, and author. Among the books he has authored are Mormonism and Music: A History, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography, and Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music. He has also contributed to the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and the Oxford Handbook of Mormonism. He has won three AML awards (in criticism and adaption), and will be presented with the 2023 AML Lifetime Achievement Award. He and his wife, Pam, are the parents of four children and have several grandchildren.
Jason Olson and James Goldberg. The Burning Book. BCC Press
Jason Olson felt God’s presence in the Jewish tradition he was raised in. So what was he supposed to do when he also heard God’s voice in the Book of Mormon? The Burning Book traces Jason’s spiritual journey from aspiring rabbi to Latter-day Saint missionary, from Brigham Young University student to Israeli immigrant, and from Jewish Studies scholar to military chaplain. It’s a memoir about one man’s experience finding God: in two faiths, in two countries, and in the lives of other people. Co-written with novelist and poet James Goldberg, The Burning Book offers readers a glimpse into Jewish and Mormon cultures and asks what it means to seek the voice of prophets in a modern, multicultural world.
Jason Olson is a Navy foreign area officer (Lt. Commander) and serves as defense policy officer at U.S. Forces Korea. He previously served as regimental chaplain forward at 2d Marine Division. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University (2016). His first book, America’s Road to Jerusalem: The Impact of the Six-Day War on Protestant Politics was released by Lexington Books in 2018.
James Goldberg’s family is Jewish on one side, Sikh on the other, and Mormon in the middle. A poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator, Goldberg has been a finalist for AML awards in Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Criticism and has won in Drama (2008, Prodigal Son) and Novel (2012, The Five Books of Jesus) as well as receiving a special award for the 2019 literary performance piece Thorns & Thistles.
Rachel Rueckert. East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage. BCC Press
Rachel panicked as she lay awake on the first night of her year-long honeymoon-a backpacking trip around the world. Though young and in love, she wasn’t sure she actually believed in marriage, let alone the lofty Mormon ideal of eternal marriage. This unconventional honeymoon felt like a brief reprieve from the crushing expectations for a Mormon bride. But this trip also offered opportunities: the chance to study wedding traditions in other cultures and the space to confront what marriage-including her own-meant to her. Along the way, she got kicked out of Peru, escaped rabid dogs in the Amazon, stumbled upon democracy protests in Hong Kong, launched an unlucky lantern in Thailand, and trekked five hundred miles across Spain in sandals. These experiences helped Rachel confront her tumultuous past, question her inherited relationship models, and embrace her restless nature within marriage-exchanging faith in certainty for faith in the day-to-day choice of partnership and faith in herself.
Rachel Rueckert is a writer, editor, teacher, and a seventh-generation Utahn. East Winds is her first book and has received a Kirkus Starred Review. Rachel holds an MFA from Columbia University, an M.Ed from Boston University, and serves as the editor in chief of Exponent II.
Criticism (Long-form)
Gary Ettari, Mormonism, Empathy, and Aesthetics: Beholding the Body. Palgrave Macmillan
This book analyzes the role that the physical body plays in foundational Mormon doctrine, and claims that such an analysis reveals a model of empathy that has significant implications for the field of Mormon aesthetics. Several chapters apply Mormonism’s theology of the body to paintings and poems by contemporary Mormon artists and writers. An examination of those works reveals that the seeds of a new Mormon aesthetic are germinating, but have yet to significantly shift traditional Mormon thought regarding the role and function of art.
Gary Ettari is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He has published on such varied topics as the role of the reader in Edmund Spenser’s sonnets, the commodification of the body in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, and Mormon aesthetics.
Frederik S. Kleiner, Experiment upon the Word. BCC Press
An examination of The Book of Mormon through the lens of literary studies. The approach uses both German and South Asian literary theory, including the concept of the post-secular, a redefined concept of literature, and rasa poetics focused on the portrayal of emotions in a literary work.
Frederik S. Kleiner received a Dr. phil. in English Philology at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel. He has taught English at the University of Kiel.
Glen Nelson, John Held Jr.’s Fiction. Center for Latter-day Saint Art
A study of the writings of the early 20th century artist and novelist John Held, in conjunction with an art exhibition of Held’s work at the Center for Latter-day Saint Art Gallery in New York City. Held, who came from a Mormon background, became one of the Jazz Age’s most famous cartoonists, known especially for his work at the New Yorker in the 1920s. He also wrote four extraordinary novels and four collections of short stories that are nearly unknown today. These works are explored and discussed in this first book on the topic.
Glen Nelson is the author of dozens of books, as well as essays, articles, short fiction, and poetry. As a ghostwriter, three of his books have become nonfiction New York Times bestsellers. He co-curated the museum exhibition Joseph Paul Vorst: A Retrospective at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. Glen also curated gallery exhibitions, Hildebrando de Melo: Nzambi (God), Casey Jex Smith: Wars and Rumors of Wars, Annie Poon: The Split House, and Joseph Paul Vorst: Lithographs, each with accompanying exhibition catalogs. He is the co-executive director of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. He hosts a monthly podcast, The Center’s Studio Podcast and co-authoring a weekly gospel study lesson with an emphasis on art, Come, Follow Me (Art Companion). He is a graduate of Southern Utah State College and New York University, and he lives in New York City.
Criticism (Short-form)
Randy Astle, “Lands Before Time: Plan of Salvation Typology in the Films of Don Bluth.” Irreantum 19: 4, Winter 2022
“Don Bluth’s films are steeped in a narrative typology that invokes not just the monomythic hero’s journey generally but the Mormon concept of the plan of salvation specifically and in great detail.”
Randy Astle is a filmmaker and screenwriter for animation and children’s media in New York. He served as Irreantum‘s film editor from 2006 to 2008, and his book Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952 won the AML Criticism Award in 2018. He’s slowly but steadily working on the next volume.
Margaret Olsen Hemming. “The Divine Feminine in Mormon Art.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 55:1, Spring 2022
“This paper examines sixteen pieces of artwork produced since 2014 by male and female artists around the world who have taken up the challenge to represent a divine female.”
Margaret Olsen Hemming is art editor at Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the former editor in chief of Exponent II and the coauthor of The Book of Mormon for the Least of These series, which was has ben finalist for the AML Religious Nonfiction Award in 2022 and 2023. She sits on the advisory board for the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts and has recently currated an exhibit on art about Heavenly Mother for the Center Gallery in New York City. She lives in North Carolina with her spouse, three children, and a large vegetable garden.
Lane Welch, “Apologia Unmasked: Brigham City, Film Noir and the Future of Mormon Cinema.” Utah Monthly, November 2022
“In Brigham City . . . Dutcher turned his eye to genre fiction, particularly the film noir genre, and through the community-interrogation mechanisms of the genre set a model for how effective film about the Mormon community can be created.”
Lane Welch is a senior studying English at Brigham Young University, whose interests include film, literature, and finding new places to keep their houseplants. Lane has previously been published in Inscape Magazine.
Rosalynde Welch, “The Secular Syllabus and the Sacred Book: Literary Scholars Approach the Book of Mormon.” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 31, 2022
“This, then, is the basic shape of the recent flowering of Book of Mormon literary criticism. Deploying the insights of post-secular critique, especially through exploration of the secular model of time and its discontents, literary scholars have directed their specialized reading skills toward the Book of Mormon’s teasing metatextuality and its complicated, deeply American entanglements with race and empire.”
Rosalynde Frandsen Welch is a research fellow and associate director at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Her research focuses on Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature. She holds a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA in English from Brigham Young University. She is one of the series editors of The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions, which won an AML award, and is the author of Ether: a brief theological introduction, as well as numerous articles, book chapters and reviews on Latter-day Saint thought.
I’m so honored to be among this mighty company. Thank you for this nomination and for the good work you do!