We are pleased to announce the 2025 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Poetry, Short Fiction and Short Fiction Collection. The final awards will be announced and presented online on June 20, as part of the 2026 AML Conference, celebrating AML’s 50th Anniversary. We will be announcing the other category finalists over the coming week, including Comics, Creative Nonfiction, Drama, Film, Middle Grade Novel, Picture Book, Religious Nonfiction, and Young Adult Novel, as well as the lifetime achievement awards. 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.
Poetry
Dave Nielsen. Meant to Be. Press 53.
Winner of the 2025 Press 53 Award for Poetry, Meant to Be is a collection of wide-ranging and unexpected poems about maintaining your sanity while trying to hold down a job and provide for your family. Each poem is a search for wisdom and intelligence in the hum-drum moments of the day. Whether coaching a girls sixth grade basketball game, assembling a king-size bed in the shadow of his father-in-law’s scowl, or enduring the vulgar heckles of high school students driving the neighborhood at night, the poet discovers minute yet worthwhile nuggets of joy. As poetry series editor Tom Lombardo said, “Most of these poems use easy humor, though never too blatant, never a chuckle. Just admiration and a smile.”
Steven L. Peck. Experiments in the Fading Light. Signature.
Experiments in the Fading Light is a poetic exploration that combines science, faith, and the aesthetic dimensions of art and nature. The poems range from a mischievous reimagining of the twelfth-century nun Hildegard von Bingen’s work on animals to looking at the deep suffering brought on by illness and other sorrows. The work also explores the concept of faith and meaning in light of how complicated life has become in our contemporary world.
An award-winning novelist, short story writer, and poet, Steven L. Peck is unusual in that he is also a working scientist who has published dozens of papers in evolutionary ecology and the philosophy of science. His worldwide studies of ecologies have given him a keen understanding of the dangers and troubles we face as a species and as individually embodied beings. He recently began to formally study soundscapes, especially the songs of our avian friends. His poetry reflects on his observations as he explores the wonders of this planet and our place in a complex world. For the body of his literary work, he received the 2021 Smith–Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters.
Jim Richards. Song for My Left Ear, Song for my Right. Fishing Line Press.
Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right examines the sweet and strange journey from the small country of childhood to the perplexing universe of adulthood. At times serious and at times absurd, these short lyrics, aphorisms, and prose poems ponder the landmarks of birth and death along with the mysterious music that soothes and terrifies in between. Filled with probing questions and questions as answers, these poems don’t offer an easy route on life’s map but shine like streetlamps punctuating the dark road.
Jim Richards completed a PhD at the University of Houston, and teaches literature and creative writing at BYU-Idaho. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, and Southern Poetry Review. He has received nominations for Best New Poets, three Pushcart Prizes, and was granted a Literary Arts Fellowship through the Idaho Commission on the Arts.
Short Fiction
James Goldberg, “The Strange Case of Frau K.” Irreantum 22.1, Spring 2025.
Jenny Rebecca Rytting, “Sister Wives.” Eternities of Cats (bonus issue of Irreantum 22), Summer 2025.
Nathan Curtis Roberts, “Yellow Tulips.” Harvard Review #61. Republished in The Best American Short Stories 2025. Eds. Celeste Ng and Nicole A. Lamy. HarperCollins.
Citlalli H. Xochitiotzin, “TIEMPO, una partícula.” Mormon Lit Blitz, April 2025. Translated as “Time, A Particle.” English translation by Elayne Petterson. Republished in Wayfare (July, 2025). English translation by Gabriel Gonzalez.
Charity Shumway. “The First Letter She Found.” Dialogue 58:3, Fall 2025.
Short Fiction Collection
Stephen Tuttle. We Should Be Somewhere by Now. Cornerstone Press.
The citizens of a small town discover that one of their own has gone missing, but also that this neighbor knew more about them than they know about each other. A group of amnesiac meteorologists find themselves in a wasteland and seem incapable of consensus on even the most basic questions. A husband discovers that his wife is shrinking but feels unable to help her or even get her to acknowledge her condition. The lives of the people in We Should Be Somewhere by Now are at turns magical and mundane, wonderful and pedestrian, feeling lost or antagonized where they most expect friendship and family. With singular style and grace, Stephen Tuttle explores what it means to be a stranger in familiar places and among familiar people.
Stephen Tuttle is a fiction writer and poet. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, and other venues. He lives with his wife and two dogs in Provo, Utah, and teaches at Brigham Young University.
Eternities of Cats. Ed. Theric Jepson. Bonus issue of Irreantum 22, Summer 2025.
Eternities of Cats consists of two novellas and a play, all imagining a contemporary world in which the LDS Church reintroduces plural marriage (at least in some form). The play is Melissa Leilani Larson’s AML Award–winning Pilot Program about a professional couple called upon by Salt Lake to pilot a reintroduction of polygamy. Michael Fillerup’s The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood, part of his AML Award–winning collection of the same name, gender swaps the polygamy thought experiment. The final piece of this collection is Jenny Rebecca Rytting’s Sister Wives, an which takes on this same topic from a new angle, ultimately prioritizing these new and strange relationships in a new order. Irreantum is proud to showcase her work alongside two classics. We’re sure you’ll agree is belongs in this lofty company.
The Christmasing Spirt: 2025 Advent Calendar of Latter-day Saint Literature. Glen Nelson, editor. Center for Latter-day Saint Arts.
This year, the Center is adding to the holiday spirit with a daily short work of literature written by some of our finest voices from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. The collection includes classic short stories by Nephi Anderson, Susa Young Gates, Josephine Spencer, and Maurine Whipple, several storied published in recent years, and ten previously unpublished works. The Advent Calendar collection showcases genres that LDS authors and readers love: speculative fiction, heartbreaking personal essays, stories that spring from our culture, and others that are universally profound but written from a uniquely LDS viewpoint.
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, as wewll as many other gallery exhibitions. He is the co-executive director of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, and hosts a monthly podcast, The Center’s Studio Podcast. He was awarded the AML Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024. He is a graduate of Southern Utah State College and New York University, and he lives in New York City.