We are pleased to announce the 2024 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Novel, Poetry, Short Fiction, and Short Fiction Collection. The final awards will be announced and presented on May 30, as part of the 2025 Association for Mormon Letters/Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference, held at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah. We will be announcing the other category finalists over the coming week, including Comics, Creative Nonfiction, Criticism, Drama, Film, Middle Grade Novel, Picture Book, Religious Nonfiction, and Young Adult Novel. 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.
Novel
Mary Clyde. Journeys from a Desert Road. Signature Press
When a sheer, brilliant light erupts in the desert night, Jack recognizes it as the awesome and destructive power of an atomic bomb. But in another world, far removed from Jack’s mind, his family sits by his side after a traumatic car accident has rendered him comatose. Jack, relying on fantasies he and his sister fabricated as teenagers, struggles to lead the people he loves out of radiation-contaminated Phoenix as his family keeps vigil in his hospital room, marshaling their reserves of patience and determination. Yet even as Jack and his family experience these different realities, events from one world drift into the other, reshaping and influencing one another as they move toward a climactic union.
Mary Clyde is the author of the short fiction collection Survival Rates, a 1999 Flannery O’Connor Award winner. Her fiction has appeared in journals and anthologies, including the Georgia Review and Quarterly West. She earned an MA from the University of Utah and an MFA from Vermont College. She has taught undergraduate writing, literature, and graduate creative writing.
Ally Condie. The Unwedding. Grand Central Publishing/Hachette
Ellery Wainwright is alone at the edge of the world. She and her husband were supposed to spend their twentieth wedding anniversary together at the luxurious Resort at Broken Point in Big Sur. Where better to celebrate a marriage, a family, and a life together than at one of the most stunning places on earth? But now she’s traveling solo. To add insult to injury, there’s a wedding at Broken Point scheduled during her stay. Ellery remembers how it felt to be on the cusp of everything new and wonderful, with a loved and certain future glimmering just ahead. Now she isn’t certain of anything except her love for her kids and a growing realization that this place, although beautiful, is unsettling.
Ally Condie is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Matched Trilogy. She has previoulsy won AML Awards for Matched, Atlantia, and Summerlost (which was also an Edgar Award Finalist). She has She has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University, and is the founder and director of the nonprofit WriteOut Foundation.
James Goldberg, Nicole Wilkes Goldberg, and Mattathias Singh. Tales of the Chelm First Ward. BCC Press
When God created the world, he sent an angel to spread the souls of fools evenly across the earth. Unfortunately, the angel tripped. As a result, the town of Chelm became home to the world’s most densely concentrated nonsense. Though most stories about Chelm are Jewish, Tales of the Chelm First Ward follows a group of locals who recently became Latter-day Saints. The thirty-two story-chapters offer glimpses into the Chelm ward’s uniquely Mormon illogic. Fruma Selig hears it’s important for her daughters to marry in the church and worries when one insists instead on getting married in the temple. Heshel is so hungry one fast Sunday that it’s hard to calculate what he owes the Lord. Shmuel Peretz knows that eight is the age of accountability and doesn’t want to waste any last free chances to sin before his birthday. Tales of the Chelm First Ward pays tribute to the everyday absurdities that come with a community of faith.
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 and Criticism and has won in Drama (2008, Prodigal Son), Novel (2012, The Five Books of Jesus), and Creative Nonfiction (The Burning Book, 2022) as well as receiving a special award for the 2019 literary performance piece Thorns & Thistles.
Nicole Wilkes Goldberg earned an MA in English literature at Brigham Young University. She has presented at the Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium and the North American Levinas Society. She is a co-creator of the Mormon Lit Blitz, and received a special AML award for the 2019 literary performance piece Thorns & Thistles. She currently divides her time between teaching English at Brigham Young University and raising her children.
Mattathias Singh’s ancestors crossed continents and oceans before his grandparents’ journeys brought them all to Provo in the 1950’s. His family’s Jewish, Sikh, and Mormon traditions have nurtured his love of stories and his hope that sharing them will help us all learn to love one another as we ought. His fiction has previously been published in The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction.
H. D. Logic. Of the Noble and Great Ones. Self
The inside story of an intellectually disabled autistic teenager’s triumphant nightmare quest to solve the riddles of life and eternity: Why was I born this way? How do I stop abuse? Where do I go to the bathroom? Our hero Juke must master these secrets and quit attacking his caregivers or face his greatest test: being torn from his family and placed in a group home with strangers. Juke finds answers and inspiration in lucid dreams of a pre-mortal spirit world where valiant Emily and brave Julian fight dragons, battle Satan, and discover the meaning of everything in a race without time.
H. D. Logic (Heavenly Dream Logic, a pseudonym) is a caregiver. He also is the voice of “Juke,” a man in his late-20s with autism and profound intellectual disability who lives in a group home. He donates to The Arc, a national organization advocating and serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.
Poetry
Maureen Clark. This Insatiable August. Signature Books
August is an insatiable month. Whether it is a dry spell, drought, or simply parched with want, or filled with thunderstorm, deluge, destruction of property or ideals, it is the place of scarcity or cloudburst, beginnings, or endings. The month of August is the focal point of what this author describes as insatiable. In these poems, she identifies the numerous places in our human experience where we face insatiability, where we are ravenous with desire for greatness, passionate for education. We lust after partners we cannot have; yearn for true love; we are voracious for sex. We fall in love with language, buttons, umbrellas, light, and silence. We live in agony and rage at the death of a loved one. We are insatiable in religious belief, even when it drains us of our time, our creativity, even our own souls. Our appetites direct our lives even if we think we have a foundation of basic beliefs to keep us afloat. In these poems, what we know and what we think we know come down to a thin string of possibility.
Maureen Clark is a writer and poet living in Bountiful, Utah. She has recently retired from the University of Utah where she taught writing for twenty years, and spent four years as the director of the University Writing Center. She received her BFA at Westminster College and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She was the president of Writers @ Work from 1999–2001. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Gettysburg Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review.
Lance Larsen. Making a Kingdom of It. University of Tampa Press
In his sixth poetry collection, Lance Larsen reminds us we are all travelers, bedraggled and tired but curious. Whether by train or on foot, whether exploring London or a suburban backyard or a childhood memory involving cuckoo clocks, the poet revels not in ticking off a successful arrival but in the jostlings of the journey. As Elizabeth Bishop once said: “Homemade, homemade, but aren’t we all?” These poems are refreshingly improvisational: lyrical but plain spoken, always in search of what will suffice. As a collection, they might be thought of as a personal Wunderkammer, a metaphoric cabinet in which to gather the wonders that make up the funky holiness of everyday life.
Lance Larsen received a PhD from the University of Houston, and teaches at Brigham Young University’s Department of English. He is the author of five previous poetry collections, three of which won AML Awards: In All Their Animal Brilliance (2005), Backyard Alchemy (2009), and What the Body Knows (2018). In 2012 Larsen was named to a five-year term as the poet laureate of Utah. He has also received a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an AML Lifetime Achievement Award.
Laura Stott. The Bear’s Mouth. Lynx House Press/Washington State University Press.
The precision and emotional clarity of Stott’s lyrical and exact poems of mother love, suffering, and exaltation offer an intimate and ultimately transcendent experience rarely provided by a book of poems.
Laura Stott is the author of two collections of poetry, In the Museum of Coming and Going (2014) and Blue Nude Migration (2020). Her poems have also been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Bellingham Review, The Rupture, and Western Humanities Review. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and teaches poetry, creative writing, and poetry + printmaking at Weber State University.
Lindsey Webb. Plat. Archway Editions/Simon & Schuster
A haunted, Western elegy which grapples with the suicide of her childhood friend in the context of their Mormon upbringing. In conversation with Joseph Smith’s prophesied but unrealized heavenly city, the Plat of Zion, Webb explores a vexed, disorienting space. Her prose poems lead the reader through an unearthly garden and into a house which eludes laws of time or space, unearthing the porous border between the living and the dead. Plat hearkens to Leonora Carrington, Lyn Hejinian, and Willa Cather, with ecstatic and painterly language that broods over gender, death, and memory like a thundercloud. As ecological and built structures feverishly crumble, Webb maps the grief of a yet-unachieved utopias in the wake of personal loss. She considers how dreams for our imagined worlds and selves may survive.
Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat, which was named a best poetry book of 2024 by The New York Times Book Review, and the chapbooks Perfumer’s Organ and House. Her writing has appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and Lana Turner, among others. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Grinnell College, and is an editor at Thirdhand Books.
Darlene Young. Count Me In. Signature Books
A collection of poems that, taken together, describe a world in its gritty and beautiful details as observed by a soul looking for God and finding him, tease and trickster that he is. An exploration of life from the perspective of a committed member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, these poems do not sugarcoat even as they demonstrate affection for the quirkiness of church culture. Within these pages are themes of longing, a mustering of faith in the face of doubt, regret, and nostalgia. Flies, whales, toothpicks—even Venmo—are all subjects of attentive observation. Overall we see a sense of yearning to be of use in the world. This is a book about singing in the dark, singing both despite and because of the dark. This is a book about hope.
Darlene Young is a poet and essayist who teaches creative writing in the BYU English Department. Her first poetry collection, Homespun and Angel Feathers, won the 2019 AML Poetry Award. She was honored with the 2022 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. She has served as the poetry editor for both Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Segullah, and she is the founder of the “MoPoWriMo” (Mormon Poetry Writing Month) group. Her work has been noted in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She lives in South Jordan, Utah.
Short Fiction
Jack Harrell, “The Boy Comes Home”. Wayfare, February.
Jack Harrell is the author of two novels, A Sense of Order and other Stories (2010 AML Short Fiction Award) and Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism (2016 AML Criticism Award). He teaches writing at Brigham Young University-Idaho.
Samantha Hastings, “Pistol of Peace”. Segullah, May.
Samantha Hastings lives in Salt Lake City, where she spends most of her time reading, eating popcorn, having tea parties, and chasing her four kids. She has degrees from Brigham Young University, University of North Texas, and University of Reading (UK). She writes under both Samantha Hastings and Samantha Larsen.
Michael A. Hooten, “Blonde and Blue”. In Pinup Noir, volume 3, Raconteur Press
Michael A. Hooten served in the navy, and currently works as an electronic engineer, mostly designing electronics that test other electronics. He is the author of several speculative fiction short stories and novels, including We are All Enlisted.
Dennis Read, “Unclean Money”. Irreantum, Autumn, 21:4.
Dennis Read is a former employee of FEMA.
Tamara Pace Thomson, “Sonya“. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Spring 2024.
Tamara Pace Thomson is a lecturer in the English department at Utah Valley University. She writes mostly fiction and poetry but occasionally publishes essays and book reviews. She and her husband have three children and three children-in-law. Tamara likes to spend her extra time with her family and their various pets.
Short Fiction Collection
David G. Pace. American Trinity and Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor. BCC Press
Twelve stories that span the Mormon Corridor. At times rendered through life’s daily grind (politics, marriage, acquiring an STD… and too many parking tickets), other times through the supernatural and fabulist (angels and personified names of the dead ripped from the real-life Utah mountain vault filled with genealogical records), these are Latter-day Saints who see things “Mormonly” (with apologies to “New Englandly” Emily Dickinson) both driven and riven by their frenetic and sacralized sense of community, their orthodoxy, their doubts and their awkward (often futile) rebellions to comical, poignant, sometimes harrowing ends.
David G. Pace is an essayist and fiction writer based in Salt Lake City. His story “American Trinity,” which appears in this collection, received an AML Award in 2011. His work has been published in the literary journals Quarterly West, ellipsis…literature and art, The Quarter(ly), Bangalore Review and Alligator Juniper, among other journals. His creative work has appeared in the collections Moth & Rust, Blossom as the Cliffrose, and the fiction anthology The Path and the Gate. He has won seven writing awards, including one for his 2015 debut novel Dream House on Golan Drive. He is currently the science writer for the College of Science, University of Utah.
Ryan Habermeyer. Salt Folk. Cornerstone Press
Set within a speculative geography that is and is not Utah’s past, present, and future, the panoramic collage of stories and flash fictions in Salt Folk explore the eco-fabulist environs of the American West at the intersections of history and myth. The Yeti, recently deported from the Himalayas, finds himself in a Mormon retirement community. A glacier grows in the toxic valley left behind by the evaporated Great Salt Lake. A librarian collects the residue of a decayed rainbow on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Melancholically absurd, the salty women and foolhardy men in Ryan Habermeyer’s reimagined American West confront catastrophes large and small, magical and mundane, with grotesque optimism and quixotic tenderness.
Ryan Habermeyer is the author of the short story collection, The Science of Lost Futures (AML Short Fiction Award, 2018). His stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. A Fulbright Scholar who has lived, taught and studied in Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Mexico, he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University.