We are pleased to announce the 2020 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Comics, Criticism, Drama, and Film. The final awards will be announced and presented on June 5, as part of the Association for Mormon Letters Virtual Conference. We will be announcing the lifetime award winners shortly. The finalists and winners are chosen by juries of authors, academics, and critics. The announcements include blurbs and author biographies, adapted from promotional websites.
Comics
Dani Jones. Everything Is Going to Be Okay.
Everything is Going to be Okay is figuring out life one drawing at a time. The webcomic is part autobiographical, part self-help, part philosophy.
Dani Jones is an illustrator, artist, comics creator, and writer. She is the author and illustrator of Monsters Vs. Kittens, and its follow-up Dinosaurs vs. Puppies, children’s books published by Stan Lee’s Kids Universe. She is also the illustrator of the New 
York Times best-selling kids’ graphic novels Popularmmos Presents A Hole New World and its sequels Enter the Mine and Zombie’s Day Off from HarperCollins. Dani has produced and self-published several projects, including the all-ages sci-fi webcomic MY SISTER THE FREAK, a graphic novel adaptation of the classic book LITTLE WOMEN, and the Halloween short story FROSTY THE GOURDMAN.
Andrew G. Knaupp and Sal Velluto. Pillar of Light: Joseph Smith’s First Vision.
Created by veteran comic book artist Sal Velluto and Andrew Knaupp, this unique telling of the First Vision incorporates elements from all the accounts given by the Prophet, as well as accounts recorded by those who heard him firsthand. The result is a rich, consistent and synergistic narrative. Pillar of Light has been carefully researched and includes details not previously shown in films and art, as well as accurate historical depictions, beautiful symbolism, and creative representations. It is inspiring to people of all ages and helps to build testimonies of the Prophet Joseph Smith and his divine mission.
Andrew Knaupp graduated from BYU with a BFA in Visual Arts Design-Illustration and has worked in the field of LDS Books since 2003 when he helped write, art direct, and research The Book of Mormon on Trial. He also helped adapt The Golden Plates graphic novels. He lives in Utah.
Sal Velluto, an Italian born – Utah resident has been working for all the major American comics publishers (Marvel, DC, Valiant) since 1986. From 1991 to 2002 Sal drew 34 issues of Marvel’s Black Panther, becoming the most prolific artist on this title. Some of Sal’s original design ideas for Black Panther were re-elaborated and used in the 2019 Oscar-winning movie. From 2007-2010 he illustrated Stories from the Life of the Prophets for The Friend magazine. Since 2007 Sal has also been illustrating The Phantom, the grandfather of all modern super-heroes. Besides comics, Sal’s work extends to advertising, animation, design, magazines, video games, role-playing games, trading cards, and toys.
Brittany Long Olsen. Magic in the Valley: The Story of Moira Green, Witch.
Middle grade graphic novel. When Moira Green leaves home to become an apprentice witch, her expectations are high. Her mother was a housekeeper for a glamorous witch in town, so Moira grew up with visions of expensive spells and potions in exotic bottles. However, her new mentor, Granny Smoot, is the exact opposite of what Moira expects. The elderly witch is old fashioned, making simple remedies one at a time out of her tiny home in the woods and rejecting Moira’s attempts to modernize the apothecary. 
Convinced that there’s a better way to be a witch and gain the villagers’ respect, Moira wants to strike out on her own. She yearns to use spells and dazzle customers, but when a life-or-death situation is at her doorstep, Moira will discover the type of magic that truly helps others.
Brittany Long Olsen is a cartoonist and illustrator who’s been making autobiographical comics for more than 10 years. Her debut graphic novel, DENDO: One Year and One Half in Tokyo won the 2015 AML Comics Award. More of her daily journal comics can be found at comicdiaries.com where she posts cartoons about adventures with her husband and their dog named Jetpack.
Matt Page. Future Day Saints: Welcome to New Zion.
This book mixes Mormon history/folklore/culture with the style and sensibilities of 1980s cartoon/toy franchises such as Bravestarr, Thundercats, and Masters of the Universe. The year is 2929, the planet earth has long been abandoned, and her former inhabitants have made their home on a planet light years away, in the Kolob solar system. This is their story. But also the story of the other diverse alien cultures they share the planet with. They are all children of the Celestial Parents and this is New Zion.
Matt Page is an artist living in Farmington, Utah. He designed the covers for A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck,, Book of Mormon Girl by Joanna Brooks, and the Monsters and Mormons anthology. In 2016 he illustrated and self published a children’s board book called B Is For Brains: An ABC book for the Zombie Apocalypse.
Criticism
Michael Hicks. Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music. Signature.
At times jubilant, at times elegiac, this set of ten essays by music historian Michael Hicks navigates topics that range from the inner musical life of Joseph Smith to the Mormon love of blackface musicals, from endless wrangling over hymnbooks to the compiling of Mormon folk and exotica albums in the 1960s. It also offers a brief memoir of what happened to LDS Church President Spencer Kimball’s record collection and a lengthy, brooding piece on the elegant strife it takes to write about Mormon musical history in the first place. There are surprises and provocations, of course, alongside judicious sifting of sources and weighing of evidence. The prose is fresh, the research smart, and the result a welcome mixture of the careful and the carefree from Mormonism’s best-known scholar of musical life.
Michael Hicks has recently retired as Professor of Music at Brigham Young University. The composer, poet, and author is a former editor of the journal American Music (2007–2010), and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography (2015). He has won three previous AML Awards, for Mormonism and Music: A History (Criticism, 1989), The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book (Adaption, 2012), and “The Second Coming of Mormon Music” (Criticism, 2017).
Carol Cornwall Madsen, “The “New Woman” and the Woman’s Exponent: An Editorial Perspective”. BYU Studies Quarterly, 59:3, 2000.
“Madsen’s essay shows us that the women of the Church never subscribed to the traditional nineteenth-century, culturally constructed view of woman as an ‘angel in the house,’ a being who had to be preserved from the rigors of public life; denied participation in education, businesses, professions, and politics; and sheltered at home with her children. Later in the century, another model called ‘the new woman’ developed, which Madsen explains as a woman who was independent, educated, outspoken, political, and professional as well as motherly. Her essay demonstrates that the work the nineteenth-century women of the Church carried out in promoting women’s suffrage and in defending themselves against caricatures by antipolygamists required them to develop the qualities of the new woman, not the demure silence and deference attributed to the angel in the house.”—Susan Howe
Carol Cornwall Madsen, professor emerita of BYU, received her PhD in history at the University of Utah and was employed by the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute of Latter-day Saint History in the Church History Department. When the institute moved to BYU, she served as associate head of the Women’s Research Institute for two years and on several university committees, including the annual Women’s Conference. She also originated a course entitled “Women and the American Experience,” which she taught for many years. She has authored or edited five books and more than fifty articles on Utah and Latter-day Saint women’s history. Five of her articles and two of her books have been award winners, including An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells (AML Biography Award, 2007).
Ardis E. Parshall and Michael Austin, editors. Josephine Spencer: Her Collected Works, Vol. 1, 1887-1899. BCC Press.
Spencer was probably the best-known and most read Mormon writer of her generation. During the 1890s, her poems and stories appeared in roughly half of the monthly issues of The Contributor and the Young Woman’s Journal, with regular appearances in the Juvenile Instructor, the Women’s Exponent, and the Sat Lake City newspapers. Yet she is known today primarily as the author of The Senator from Utah and other Stories of the Wasatch (1895), a thin volume that collects seven of the hundred or so stories that she published in her lifetime. It is an intensely partisan book. Spencer was a member of the Populist Party, a supporter of unions and the government ownership of industries. Her stories range across the whole spectrum of the day’s fictional genres: a “lost city” adventure, a supernatural tale, romances, coming-of-age tales, a spy story set in the Revolutionary War, and a post-manifesto polygamy drama about a man compelled to testify against his brother. And then there is Spencer’s poetry, which also runs the gamut from odes to the beauty of the Wasatch to Mormon historical epics to a brief and jaunty verse about the coming proletariat revolution.
Ardis E. Parshall is a historian, freelance researcher specializing in Mormon history, and author. She co-edited with Paul Reeve Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia, co-edited with Michael Austin The Mormon Image In Literature, and co-wrote with James Goldberg Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic. She has created over 8000 Mormon history posts at her Keepapitchininblog, wrote five years of Mormon history columns for the Salt Lake Tribune, contributed to public history projects like Century of Black Mormons, and created the ongoing “Who We Lost” series. The Mormon History Association created the Ardis E. Parshall Public History Award in her honor.
Michael Austin is Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana. He is the author of ten previous books, including the bestselling textbook, Reading the World: Ideas that Matter. His essay “How to Be a Mormo-American; Or, The Function of Mormon Criticism at the Present Time” won an AML Criticism Award (1995) and his book Re-Reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem won an AML Religious Nonfiction Award (2014). His monograph on the works of Vardis Fisher will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2021. He is an editor at BCC Press and Chairman of the Board of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
Anthony Sweat. Repicturing the Restoration: New Art to Expand our Understanding. BYU Religious Studies Center.
While existing artwork that portrays the Restoration is rich and beautiful, until now many key events in Latter-day Saint history have surprisingly never been depicted to accurately represent important events of the historical record. The purpose of this volume is to produce paintings of some of the underrepresented events in order to expand our understanding of the Restoration. Each image includes a richly researched historical background, some artistic insights into the painting’s composition, an application section providing one way this history may inform our present faith, and an analysis section offering potent questions that can be considered for further discussion. Through these new paintings, Sweat takes readers through a timeline history of pivotal events and revelations of the early Restoration. This book is not just a wonderful art book, it is also a pedagogical book using art as a launching pad to learn, evaluate, apply, and discuss important aspects of Latter-day Saint history and doctrine as readers repicture the Restoration.
Anthony Sweat is an associate professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. He received his bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing and his PhD in curriculum and instruction. He is the author of several books, most recently Seekers Wanted and The Holy Invitation.
Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, Lynne Larson, editors. A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple. BCC Press.
Maurine Whipple (1903-1992) was the author of the landmark Mormon novel The Giant Joshua (1941). She wrote many other remarkable short fiction pieces and magazine articles over the years, only a few of which have been published. The editors collected and wrote introductions for her published stories and her best previously unpublished work, including magazine stories about fascinating people and places in extreme corners of the intermountain west, several short stories,and Cleave the Wood, the unfinished sequel to The Giant Joshua.
Veda Hale is a painter, primary school educator, and author. She graduated from Brigham Young University and taught elementary school. She met Maurine Whipple in 1990 and spent much of the next two years with her, interviewing her and organizing her papers. Her work resulted in “Swell Suffering”: A Biography of Maurine Whipple (2011), which won the year’s Best Biography Award from the Mormon Historical Association. She is also the author of the novel Ragged Circle (2003), as well as several works of literary criticism. She and her husband opened and operated an art gallery near Panguitch Lake for several years. She makes her home in Lindon, Utah.
Andrew Hall teaches East Asian History at Kyushu University. He is a book review editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He has authored several articles on Japanese colonial education and co-edited Education history in Manchuria and Korea: An International Approach (2016).
Lynne Larson has turned her full attention to reading, writing, and promoting western literature and history after an award-winning career as an educator in Idaho. She has published several novels (most recently Witness in the Dark(2017)), short stories, articles, essays, and magazine columns. She is a graduate of Brigham Young University and has an M.A. degree in English from Idaho State University.
Drama
Normally only new works produced in the calendar year are considered for this award. Due to the coronavirus, the requirements were changed, so that scheduled works that had to postponed or cancelled were also considered.
Melissa Leilani Larson. Mountain Law. Women’s Voices Play Festival, Orlando, FL
In the winter of 1850, Tamson English has been alone with three young children on the Western frontier for more than a year. Food is running short, and there is no sign of the settlers who should have relieved her months ago. Haunted by guilt over an extramarital affair, Tamson convinces herself that God has trapped her in the wilderness as a punishment for her sins. When she prays for a reprieve, an old friend appears at her door—but it’s hard to know whether his coming is a miracle or a curse.
Melissa Leilani Larson is a writer based in Salt Lake City. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Previously produced plays include: The Edible Complex, Pride and Prejudice,Persuasion, Martyrs’ Crossing, A Flickering, Lady in Waiting, The Weaver of Raveloe, Sweetheart Come, and Bitter Lemon. Two of her plays, 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. She was a contributing writer to the LDS Church History Department’s Saints series. She has won three AML Drama Awards, and was awarded the 2018 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters.
Glen Nelson (liberetto) and Lansing McLoskey (music). The Captivity of Hannah Dunston.
An opera commissioned by the Guerilla Opera Company. The May premiere in Haverhill, MA, was cancelled due to the Coronavirus.
Amidst a social backdrop of the nation wrestling with its monuments and troubled histories, The Captivity of Hannah Duston investigates the legacy of the first American woman to have a public statue in her honor, Hannah Duston of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Controversial even in her lifetime (1657-c.1737), Duston’s story of her abduction by Native Americans during the King William’s War and her escape and slaying of her captors raises many ethical questions. Notable authors, Cotton Mather, John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Sarah Josepha Hale retold the story over a period of 150 years—contradicting and attacking each other’s version of the story, employing Duston as a narrative pawn. Composer Lansing McLoskey and librettist Glen Nelson use historic texts by those authors, set into a contemporary frame, to call into question absolute notions of history and truth, and employ the Duston accounts to provoke a reassessment of national heroes and their stories.
Lansing McLoskey’s music has been performed in 21 countries, and he has won more than three dozen national and international awards, including two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2019 Bogliasco Foundation (Italy) fellowship, the 2018 Aaron Copland House Award, the Robert Avalon International Composition Competition, the Omaha Symphony International New Music Competition, the Kenneth Davenport National Competition for Orchestral Works, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition, and the Charles Ives Center Orchestral Composition Competition.
Glen Nelson is the author of 33 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, Utah. Glen also curated gallery exhibitions, Hildebrando de Melo: Nzambi (God), Casey Jex Smith: Wars and Rumors of Wars, Annie Poon: The Split House, and Joseph Paul Vorst: Lithographs, each with accompanying exhibition catalogs. His most recent book is Joseph Paul Vorst, the first book-length biography of the artist. In 1999, he founded Mormon Artists Group, and he published 31 projects and collaborations with 82 artists. He has written the librettos for three operas by the composer Murray Boren: The Book of Gold, The Dead, and The Singer’s Romance. He is the co-executive director of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. He hosts a monthly podcast, The Center’s Studio Podcast and co-authoring a weekly gospel study lesson with an emphasis on art, Come, Follow Me (Art Companion). He is a graduate of Southern Utah State College and New York University, and he lives in New York City.
Ariel Mitchell. Give Me Moonlight. Motor House, Baltimore, February.
Some sorrow we bear alone. Some sorrow has to be shared. Give Me Moonlight is about the sorrow that is so deep that it can barely be felt let alone acknowledged in the bright light of day. This surrealist play tells the fictionalized true story of Bessie and Albert Johnson, a couple in early 1900s Chicago who seem to have everything. But when Bessie brings home a less-than-acceptable houseguest, the sorrows that have been festering under the surface come seeping through the facades she and her husband have created to protect their life and marriage. Based on the history of Scotty’s Castle, this play explores why two people would risk what they barely have to build a castle for a con-artist in the middle of the desert.
Ariel Mitchell earned her BA in Playwriting in 2013 from Brigham Young University and her MFA in Musical Theatre Writing in 2015 from New York University. She has written several plays including A Second Birth, about an Afghan girl who was raised as a boy, for which she was awarded the KCACTF Harold and Mimi Steinberg 2013 National Student Playwriting Award, a Vera Hinckley Mayhew Award, and an AML Drama Award. Her MFA thesis was MORMONish (book and lyrics), a semi-autobiographical musical dramedy, which tells the story of a half Mormon, half Jewish girl searching for where she fits in a family where everyone believes something different. Her one-woman play The Shower Principle was a 2018 AML Drama Award finalist, and she recently adapted it into a dramatic podcast.
Tom Russell and BYU School of Media Arts Students. Escape from Planet Death.
A scripted ten-episode comedy/drama podcast. A crew of bureaucrats, escaping to a distant planet, must confront a rogue robot that threatens to destroy humanity. The podcast is a mentored production, created by students in the BYU school of Media Arts. A different version of the story, written by Tom Russell, will be produced as a stage play in 2021.
Upon graduating with a screenwriting degree, Tom Russell began working in the advertising industry as a copywriter and director. He received over 40 Addy Awards, four Auroras, and five Silver Microphones for television, radio, and print. He has executive produced student films which have been recognized by over 30 international film festivals including the student Emmys. Feature film credits as writer and director include Mental, mr. dungbeetle, Diantha’s Crossing, and For Robbing the Dead. He also co-directs the biennial Writer’s Conference at Timp Lodge. Russell is currently a Teaching Professor of Media Arts at Brigham Young University.
Film
Gruff
Directed by Kohl Glass, produced by Dallin Cerva and Jacquelyn Cerva. 12 minute short.
Two goats wait for their big brother to kill the troll that may or may not be under the bridge they need to cross in this adaptation of Three Billy Goats Gruff.
Heart of Africa.
Directed and written by Tshoper Kabambi, co-written and produced by Margaret Blair Young. 90 minute feature.
Gabriel Ngandu is a young Congolese revolutionary running from the terrible mistakes of his past. His journey of escape leads him to new experiences and even a new religion that challenges long-held beliefs about his destiny and the world around him. He finds himself torn between the influences and expectations of two very different father figures — Mwabila, his revolutionary leader, and President Kabasubabu, his new religious leader. Called to serve as a missionary, he is sent back to his native village to build an orphanage with Jason Martin, an American who also has a tragic 
and secret past. Together, they struggle to understand and overcome their histories, cultures, and prejudices to serve the people around them. Heart of Africa is the first Congolese-American co-production of a feature film, and one of the first produced and filmed entirely in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by a Congolese film team. Heart of Africa 2: Companions is being released in 2021.