We are pleased to announce the 2025 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Comics, Drama, Feature Film, and Short Film. 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 Poetry, Short Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, 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.
Comics
Maddie Baker. “Minerva!” Wayfare, January 2025.
A short graphic story about Minerva Teichert.
Maddie Baker is an illustrator and comic maker living in St. Louis. She received a BFA in Illustration from Brigham Young University and a MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture from Washington University. She has worked on religious books for children with For Little Saints, as well as children’s magazine editorials, and self published comics.
Michael Grover. Deeply Dave. MacMillian.
For fans of Adventure Time, Deeply Dave is a madcap, hilarious adventure graphic novel about a young deep sea diver who heroically plunges into the abyss to save his astronaut mom from the monsters that lurk below.
Michael Grover is an Eisner and Harvey Award-nominated cartoonist and animator. He wakes up every morning and goes to sleep every night. He lives in a house with his wife and kids. He wants to make a lot of comics before he dies.
Nick Perkins. Ginseng & Dreams: 1776-1816: The Beginnings of Mormonism.
The graphic novel Ginseng & Dreams chronicles important events in and around the life of Joseph Smith. Told primarily from the point of view of Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack, we hear firsthand the triumphs and struggles of the Smith family as they raise their children in New England. Additionally, accounts from such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Dartmouth surgeon Nathan Smith, and early Mormon leader Wilford Woodruff shed light on goings-on in the Smith environs: visions, dreams, treasure-digging, Joseph’s childhood leg surgery, and a devastating volcanic eruption halfway around the world all contribute to an engaging narrative.
Nick Perkins first began publishing cartoons in college in Utah State University’s student newspaper, The Utah Statesman (Ag-gravation, 1998-2002). He also wrote and drew political cartoons for The Herald Journal in Logan, Utah (2002-2005) and the Davis County Clipper in Bountiful, Utah (2006-2009). His work has also been published in Sunstone Magazine, and his story “Creatures Great & Small” appears in the 2018 collection Served: A Missionary Anthology.
Camilla Stark. The Desert Prophet. Camilla Stark Art.
An offbeat climate parable about a disillusioned apocalyptic prophet in a desert full of saints, sinners, and beasts. The Desert Prophet knows that the world is ending—and that it’s our fault. But even as seas rise and the earth shakes, no one is listening. So why preach at all? The Desert Prophet shakes the dust off their feet and puts an end to their voice of warning. But resigning your calling as apocalyptic prophet is not so easy. The Desert Prophet must cross a desert full of saints, sinners, and beasts to climb the Mountain and justify their choice to the Desert God. Now the Desert Prophet must fully reckon with the consequences of their resignation, and what it means to live a moral life in a world that seems to be ending.
Camilla Stark is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer who makes work about light & dark, life & death, and love & fear. She is one of the founders of the Arch Hive artist collective, which won a 2019 AML Special Award in Literature and Art. She lives in Provo, Utah with her husband and very small son.
Tui T. Sutherland and Jake Parker. Wings of Fire: Legends Darkstalker. Graphix.
Three dragons. One unavoidable, unpredictable destiny. This is the beginning… of the end.In the SeaWing kingdom, a young prince learns he is an animus — capable of wonderful magic that comes with a terrible price.In the mind of a NightWing dragonet, a thousand futures unfold — and almost all of them, she knows, lead to disaster and destruction. And under three full moons and the watchful eyes of his NightWing mother and IceWing father, the most powerful dragon Pyrhhia will ever know is clawing his way out of his egg. Darkstalker, the dragon who will change the world forever.Long before the SandWing war, lifetimes before the Dragonet Prophecy… darkness is born.
Jake Parker is an illustrator, animator, and children’s book author, who has worked on feature films such as Epic, Rio, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and Horton Hears a Who! and has published picture books and comic books such as The Little Snowplow, Rocket Raccoon, The Tooth Fairy Wars (AML Award finalist), The Girl Who Wouldn’t Brush Her Hair, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man, Little Bot and the Sparrow, and Ryder’s Intergalactic Guide to Robots (AML Award finalist). He is also the founder of Inktober, a popular celebration of ink drawing.
Drama
Morag Shepherd. The Big Quiet. PYGmallion Theater Company, Rose Wagner Center Black Box Theatre, Salt Lake City, February – March, 2025.
Sister Garcia and Sister Roberts are companions in San Diego, California in 2005. The entire play takes place in their missionary apartment, where we see their relationship evolve, devolve, and erupt as they wrestle with the confines of the rules, and determine their relationship with food, fasting, and God.
Morag Shepherd is the artistic director of Immigrant’s Daughter Theatre and is a member of the Plan-B writers lab, where her play MY BROTHER WAS A VAMPIRE, and NOT ONE DROP has performed. Her play BURN received the 2016 AML Drama Award. Her play WORSHIP recently performed with the Utah Arts Alliance (The Utah Review top moment of 2023), and her play DO YOU WANT TO SEE ME NAKED has performed in Salt Lake City, Tucson, and The United Solo Festival in New York City. Her site-specific play, CHERRY WINE IN PAPER CUPS performed outside the Salt Lake City library summer 2020, and her immersive play, A BRIEF WALTZ IN A LITTLE ROOM performed throughout 2019 in Salt Lake City.
Ben Abbott. Backward. Hollins Playwrights Lab New Works Festival, Summer 2025. MFA Thesis, Hollins University.
Backward is a solo show about a man who, when he turns forty-five, starts living backward in time. Every day he wakes up, he has traveled back to the day before the one he just lived and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. As he relives his life in reverse, he must confront his failures as a husband and father. Even as he learns the lessons necessary to repair them, those relationships get left behind in the future. He continues moving backward and eventually must confront the most difficult relationship of them all: his relationship with his own father.
Ben Abbott attended the Acting Conservatory at the Pacific Conservatory Theatre in Santa Maria, California and earned a B.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from U.C. Berkeley, and an M.F.A. in Playwriting at Hollins University in Virginia. He has worked as an actor for nearly 20 years, including at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Pioneer Theatre, Hale Centre Theatre, and The Great American Melodrama. His play Buddies: A Bromantic Comedy won the 2024 AML Drama Award.
Melissa Leilani Larson. The Boxcar Children. Liahona Theater for the Community, Pleasant Grove, UT, June 2025.
A tender, minimalist take on Gertrude Chandler Warner’s classic. With inventive staging and heartfelt performances, it becomes a moving meditation on childhood resilience, imagination, and the quiet power of chosen family.The story follows four orphaned siblings in the early 1920s fending for themselves and living in an abandoned boxcar. Though very young, the children are able to create a home for themselves, finding odd jobs to bring in money and a heartwarming sense of joy and adventure in their situation.
Melissa Leilani Larson is a writer based in Salt Lake City. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. She has won four AML Drama Awards, for Little Happy Secrets (2009), Pride and Prejudice (2014), Pilot Program (2015), and Mountain Law (2020), and was awarded the 2018 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. Other produced plays include: Martyrs’ Crossing, A Flickering, Lady in Waiting, The Weaver of Raveloe, The Edible Complex, Persuasion, Sweetheart Come, and Bitter Lemon. Little Happy Secrets and Pilot Program were published together in a book titled Third Wheel (2017). Her produced screenplays include Jane and Emma and Freetown, both of which were AML Film Award finalists.
Feature Film
Omaha. Directed by Cole Webley, written by Robert Machoian. Greenwich Entertainment.
Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, January 2025, wide release in April 2025. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 economic crisis, Omaha follows a struggling father (John Magaro) who embarks on a road trip across the American West with his two children, in search of hope and a better life. What begins as a seemingly spontaneous family journey gradually reveals deeper layers of both grief and resilience, as the daughter starts to sense that her father’s intentions may be masking a more profound truth. With its quiet, stripped-down storytelling, Omaha resonates emotionally, capturing the deep, unspoken bond between a father and his children while reflecting on the resilience required to keep a family intact during uncertain times.
Truth & Treason. Written and directed by Matt Whitaker.
As WWII rages, Helmuth Hübener, a teenage LDS boy in Germany, is forced to confront a terrible truth—loyalty to his country now means loyalty to a lie. When his trusted bishop urges obedience to the Nazi regime, he begins to question everything. And after his Jewish friend is taken away, he secretly listens to banned radio broadcasts and launches a resistance, exposing the truth. In a nation ruled by fear, defiance comes at a cost—and as the regime closes in, he must decide what it truly means to be a good German.
Standout: The Ben Kjar Story. Written and directed by Tanner Christensen. Angel Studios.
Standout tells the inspiring story of Ben Kjar, born with Crouzon Syndrome, a rare craniofacial disorder. From birth, doctors warned that his life would be dominated by limitations, bullying and harsh scrutiny. Despite that prognosis, Ben yearned for an ordinary life free from judgment and harassment. However, each experience of adversity, including relentless bullying and a series of painful surgeries, ignited a fire within him. Wrestling became his proving ground, a place where he learned to transform his facial difference into a source of power. Determined to succeed, he pushed himself relentlessly, breaking through physical, social, and even romantic barriers that once seemed insurmountable. Documentary with dramatized sections.
Short Film
Java Jive. Written and directed by Barrett Burgin.
A thirsty young man tries to resist a hot drink.
I Hid My Heart Inside My Head. Directed by Luis Fernando Puente, written by Lizde Arias.
A Mormon man wrestles with his faith as he comes to terms with his wife’s inevitable death; tensions arise when the men of his congregation arrive to give a healing blessing to the frail and sickly woman.
All These Pieces. Written and directed by Steven Bartholomew, co-written by Trent Hortin.
When a college football player’s friend confides in him that she was raped, he knows standing with her against his best friend could cost him everything.