Celebrating 50 Years of AML

The Association for Mormon Letters Awards Conference, “Celebrating 50 Year of AML,” will be held online, June 20, 2026, and broadcast on Youtube. Each segment will be made available on June 20, and the videos will be archived in perpetuity on the AML Youtube Channel.

We will begin by honoring our two 2026 career achievement awards: James Goldberg will be presented with the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters, and Angela Hallstrom will be presented with the AML Lifetime Achievement Award. Pre-recored interviews with each will be made available in the morning of June 20, along with a panel discussing James Goldberg’s career.

We will then celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Association for Mormon Letters, by featuring a roundtable conversation with several of the artists and administrators affiliated with the organization over the past decades: Levi Peterson, Bruce Jorgensen (both founding members in 1976), John Bennion, Chris Bigelow, Gideon Burton, James Goldberg, Andrew Hall, and Jessie Christensen. They discuss the founding and development of AML, and how Mormon literature has developed over those fifty years.

At 5:00 Mountain time, the AML Awards Ceremony, hosted by Jeanine Bee, begins. We will be presenting the AML Awards for outstanding works published in 2025 in a wide variety of formats, including novel, short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, drama, film, and many more. Many of the awardees sent in short acceptance speech videos, that are a highlight of the conference.

This year we did not hold our normal full conference, so we did not accept proposals for papers. We plan to hold a full conference in 2027. Please mark June 20 in your calendar, and plan to watch the events at https://www.youtube.com/@associationmormonletters. The videos will all be available for viewing at later times as well.