James Goldberg has been presented with the 2026 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. Below are two videos, broadcast at Association for Mormon Letters online conference, June 20, 2026. First, Melissa Leilani Larson, James’ colleague in the theater and formerly at the Church History Department, interviewed James about his career. Second, we convened a panel of experts to discuss different aspects of James’ career: the novelists Katherine Cowley and Rafael Vásquez, the poet and poetry scholar Ed Whitley, and the historian Christopher Jones. They are followed by the official award citation.
James Goldberg interview, with Melissa Leilani Larson
Considering James: Writers on the work of James Goldberg
Award Citation
Over the past twenty years, James Goldberg has established himself as a central figure in the Mormon literary community, writing poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays, and book-length creative nonfiction all related to the Mormon experience; he has also translated Mormon fiction and acted as a community organizer. Aristotle advocated for “observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” and James does this not with argument but with storytelling by embracing, wrestling, and playing with many forms, formats, and traditions to bring life, insight, and perspective to the page. In a 2013 interview with Mormon Artist, Goldberg explained, “I’m a storyteller, and I use the format that’s best for the story.”[1] Like Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Langston Hughes, and Rabindranath Tagore in their communities, James Goldberg is a Mormon literary polymath.
In 2006, James Goldberg burst onto the Mormon literary scene as a cofounder of the New Play Project; at one of the early productions, he called for a Mormon Renaissance, inviting both creators and audiences to engage with the Mormon experience. One of the results of the New Play Project was Goldberg’s own play, Prodigal Son, which won the 2008 AML Award for Drama. Another result seems to be a refining of Goldberg’s theatrical sensibility, including, first, an acute awareness of the aural power of language, second, a recognition that all literature and art is in conversation with an audience, and third, a commitment to collaboration, which has led to a number of co-authored projects throughout his career.
Goldberg received an MFA in Creative Writing at Brigham Young University in 2010, where he was surprised by the implied pushback by some academic leaders at his interest in writing literature about Mormons for a Mormon audience. As a graduate student, he also worked on the Joseph Smith Papers Project.
One of his next creative projects, The Five Books of Jesus, won the 2012 AML Novel Award and was included in the AML 100 Works of Significant Mormon Literature. The book is a lyrical novelization of the life of Jesus and invites us to use our imaginations to inhabit the world—and the hearts—of those who lived and walked with Jesus. In the book, Goldberg writes, “Here is something true: The imagination needs to be strong as the heart, sometimes stronger, because while to heart sustains the body, the imagination sustains the soul.” Throughout Goldberg’s work, this theme of the imagination can be found time and time again as his work cascades across a number of literary genres and forms.
His poetry, including AML Award finalist Let Me Drown with Moses, as well as his collections Phoenix Song and A Book of Lamentations, explores the tension and struggle that come from seeking the divine, even when everything around us seems to be falling apart. Scott Hales writes that Let Me Drown with Moses “makes a case for the ongoing value of Mormonism, its continued relevance, and intrinsic ability to heal itself and others.”[2]
Goldberg and his wife Nicole Wilkes Goldberg also wrote and spearheaded “Thorns and Thistles: A Concert of Literature,” which won an AML Special Award in Literature and Performance. The work weaved together excerpts from the poems, essays, short stories, and novels of twenty different Mormon Artist; set to live cello accompaniment, the work was performed by professional actors at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts Festival in New York in 2019.
With Janci Patterson, Goldberg co-wrote The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, a YA Sikh-Mormon romance. With Nicole and with his brother Mattathias Singh, Goldberg authored Tales of the Chelm First Ward, which won the 2024 AML Novel Award. He was the solo author of The First Five-Dozen Tales of Razia Shah and Other Stories. In each of these works we see a multicultural sensibility and an awareness of other faith and literary traditions. Goldberg has credited his own heritage—with Jewish, Sikh, and Mormon ancestry—as helping create his unique perspective.
A number of nonfiction projects have also seen James’ storytelling contributions. Working at the Church History Department, James was a contributing writer for the first two volumes of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days; the book Revelations in Context; and the Global Histories project. He is also one of four co-authors for Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024, which recently received the Mormon History Association’s Best Book Award. He coauthored Song of Names: A Modern Mormon Mosaic with historian Ardis Parshall; the book is included in the AML 100 Works of Significant Mormon Literature. He is also a coauthor of James Olson’s memoir The Burning Book, which won the 2022 AML Creative Nonfiction Award. With Nicole, he recently released the biography Latter-day Sikh: From a Guru’s Feet to a Prophet’s Call, which tells the story of his grandfather, an early Sikh convert and the first mission president in India.
If there were time and space, we could discuss Goldberg’s contributions to television, his role as an interpreter of scripture, the insights that he has offered live audiences, his short stories, his four additional AML nominations, his winning of the 2024 Storymakers Outstanding Achievement Award, and his work in literary translations. We could address his tenure as the president of the Association for Mormon Letters, his work as an AML board member, his incessant community building, the way he constantly mentors other writers, and his visionary role in cofounding both the Mormon Lit Blitz (which in the past fifteen years has published over 250 original short works of Mormon literature) and the Mormon Lit Lab (which in addition to running literary contests, has published two anthologies and mentored authors as they write book-length projects). But instead, let us return to his approach to imagination—the divine imagination.
Goldberg has argued that “there’s a distinction for me between the gospel of Jesus Christ–which is made of divine truth I try to grasp in my slippery mortal hands—and Mormonism, which is just a big pile of everything people in my tradition have said, imagined, speculated, done. I love Mormonism as an imaginationscape. I know it’s not all pure divine truth, but playing in Mormon ideas and imagery has let me fall into the divine again and again.”[3] One of Goldberg’s greatest contributions is that he is not interested in playing in this Mormon imaginationscape on his own—he yearns for a storytelling Zion, where we all build and participate together.
In a landmark AML presidential address, “In the Wilderness,” Goldberg invites us to tend the Mormon literary harvest, to work together to build a literature of our own, and to build a community that nourishes writers and creators, so they are not left to create in the wilderness. “This is possible,” says Goldberg. “I would love to taste the fruits of a tended harvest…. But if not? I refuse to let that matter. I will write in the desert. I will search out the half-forgotten names of those who went before and glean what I can from them. I will sing the songs of our people, I will speak our language, I will find the fire in the words God gave us and beg it to burn just one more time. The wilderness has been good to me. I have lived off the old herder foods of milk and honey, and my work has blossomed as the rose.”
James Goldberg’s works truly have blossomed as the rose, and for this we are pleased to award him with the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. As we do so, we look forward to his future contributions, and we hope that each of us will do more to follow in his footsteps and use our imaginations to cultivate a Mormon literary community.
[1] Brady, Meaghan. Interview with James Goldberg. Mormon Artist, August 2013, https://mormonartist.net/interviews/james-goldberg-2013/.
[2] Hales, Scott. “James Goldberg’s Let Me Drown with Moses: A Review.” Artistic Preaching: Exploring Mormon Literature, 5 August 2015. https://artisticpreaching.wordpress.com/2015/08/05/james-goldbergs-let-me-drown-with-moses-a-review/.
[3] Goldberg, James. “James Goldberg’s Mormon literature holiday recommendations, pt. 2.” Dawning of a Brighter Day, 23 December 2018. https://www.associationmormonletters.org/2018/12/james-goldbergs-holiday-pt-2/.
(Citation by Katherine Cowley)