James Goldberg and Angela Hallstrom will be honored for their career accomplishments at the Association for Mormon Letters online conference, June 20, 2026. Angela Hallstrom will receive the AML Lifetime Achievement Award and James Goldberg will receive the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. Interviews with both, and a panel discussing James’ writing, will be broadcast as part of the AML Conference on the AML Youtube channel on June 20.
Below is basic information about Angela’s and James’s careers. Full award citations will be announced and published here by June 20.
James Goldberg: Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters
James Goldberg has carved out a career as literary religious writer, who purposely tries to speak to Latter-day Saint audiences, asking them to see their sacred stories in new and different ways. He began on this road when, as a co-founder and Artistic Director of the New Play Project in Provo, he and his collaborators began creating overtly religious plays, including James’ Prodigal Son. Since then, as a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, documentary filmmaker, historian, and translator, Goldberg has been a finalist for ten AML awards, and has won in five. He was a finalist for works in Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Criticism, and Short Fiction. His AML award winning works are:
2008, Drama. Prodigal Son
2012, Novel. The Five Books of Jesus
2019 Special Award in Literature and Performance. Thorns and Thistles: A Concert of Literature (co-created with Nicole Wilkes Goldberg)
2022, Creative Nonfiction. The Burning Book (co-written with Jason Olsen)
2024, Novel. Tales of the Chelm First Ward (co-written with Nicole Wilkes Goldberg and Mattathias Singh)
James is also the co-founder and administrator of the Mormon Lit Blitz, an annual micro-literature contest, and the creator of the Mormon Lit Lab, both of which have been instrumental in encouraging and training new writers, in particular writers whose work has been in languages other than English.
Besides his literary works, James also writes for the Church History Department, where he contributed to the Saints series, Revelations in Context, the Global Histories, and other projects. On June 6, just days ago, James, along with his co-authors Lisa Olsen Tait, Amber C. Taylor, and the late Kate Holbrook, were presented with the Mormon History Association’s Best Book Award for Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024.
Angela Hallstrom: AML Lifetime Achievement Award
Angela Hallstrom is a writer, editor, educator, and therapist, who has been a key figure in Mormon literature, both through her own writing and her mentorship and guidance of other authors. For several years she taught English and composition in high schools and universities. She served as a features and then fiction editor at AML’s literary journal Irreantum, and was given an AML Special Award for Service in 2006, after she stepped in after the sudden death of Irreantum editor Laraine Wilkins, when she combed through Laraine’s records to recreate and enact her plans for the upcoming issue. She then served as one of the head editors of Irreantum in 2007-2010. She has also served on the editorial boards of the journals Segullah and BYU Studies Quarterly.
Her 2008 novel Bound on Earth, which follows members of an extended family, told through connected chapters that can also function as stand-alone stories, was immediately hailed as one of the great Mormon novels of the modern era — both in its literary skill and its focus on Mormon characters. Its AML Novel Award citation stated, “Hallstrom’s Mormon characters have real problems, the kinds of struggles that everyone has, regardless of religion. But they also have a Mormon worldview, and they view their problems from a background of belief. Part of Hallstrom’s genius lies in her ability to present this faithful background without either mockery or defensiveness—the way many of us feel about our own faith. With her unerring eye for situation and skillful use of varying points of view, Hallstrom expertly weaves the characters’ faith into the stories in a way that makes their motivations clear and their faith believable.”
Angela next turned to assembling Dispensation: Latter-Day Fiction, an anthology of the best of recent Mormon short fiction. It won an AML Award for Editing, and the citation read, “A successful anthology requires an editor with comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter who can skillfully analyze a diverse body of work as well as synthesize the unwieldy mass into a cohesive, engaging, and portable package. Few in the Mormon literary community are qualified to compile a representative collection of contemporary LDS short fiction, and of this select group, none are better suited to the task than Angela Hallstrom . . . Dispensation features carefully chosen short stories which hold universal meaning even as they encapsulate the unique essence of a genre, subject, and era.”
From 2016 to 2021, Angela worked in the Church’s History Department, working with James and other author/historians to construct and write the 4-volume Saints series, which presented true stories of LDS people all over the world, told with literary flair. In recent years, Angela has worked as a marriage and family therapist, while continuing to frequently serve in the AML as an awards judge.
.
Brilliant selections.