Lifetime Achievement Awards: Lavina Fielding Anderson and Robert Kirby

The Association for Mormon Letters will present two lifetime achievement awards at the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference Banquet on March 23, held at the Brigham Young University Skyroom Restaurant, 6:30-8:30 pm. Lavina Fielding Anderson will be presented with the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters, and Robert Kirby will be presented with the Association for Mormon Letters Lifetime Achievement Award. Both authors will be attending the conference in person. There will also be one panel dedicated to each awardee as part of the MSH Conference, held in the afternoon of March 23, before the award ceremony.

Lavina Fielding Anderson

The panel “Lavina Fielding Anderson and Mormon Literature” will be held on March 23, 3:00-4:30, at the Education in Zion Theater in the Joseph F. Smith Building (JFSB) at BYU. The panel will include John Bennion, Dennis Clark, Susan Elizabeth Howe, Bruce Jorgensen, Ross Peterson, and Lavina Fielding Anderson.

Lavina Fielding Anderson has used her extraordinary intellect and talent as a writer and editor to create and promote Mormon literature and letters throughout her long, distinguished career.

She has worked tirelessly for The Association for Mormon Letters since its creation.  She attended the 1976 meeting at which the association was conceived and became a member of the five-person steering committee that created the Articles of Incorporation and organized the first conference. She has served as a board member, president, and conference organizer, and worked for the association in many other formal and informal capacities. From 1994 to 2002, she was the editor of each volume of the annual proceedings of the Association, which included most of the papers delivered at both the annual conference and MLA sessions. The history of the Association for Mormon Letters is in some ways a history of the development of Mormon literature, and Lavina’s meticulous and thorough editing has preserved many of the AML scholarly papers for the research and attention of future generations.

Lavina’s work as an editor extended into many other periodicals—the Ensign, the Journal of Mormon History, Mormon Woman’s Forum Quarterly, and Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance. She served as the associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought from 1982 to 1987, and in other editorial capacities for eleven additional years. She is also a longtime member of the editorial advisory board of Signature Books, and has helped many authors shape their work before publication. This extraordinary record demonstrates that Lavina has shaped and improved much of Mormon intellectual and literary work of the past forty years.

She has also edited three books of particular literary and cultural importance. With Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Lavina compiled and edited Sisters in Spirit; Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, a collection of essays by important Mormon women scholars. These essays deal with doctrines and practices of the LDS Church that particularly affect Mormon women. Published in 1987 by University of Illinois Press, the volume brought attention to many feminist concerns that continue to be significant to this day.

Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature, which Lavina edited with Eugene England, is the first collection of essays in Mormon literary criticism, including England’s review of the development of Mormon literature from the early days of the Church to the 1990s. This volume has been of great significance in bringing together major essays that examine the literary merit of early LDS texts, including accounts of Joseph Smith’s first vision and The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt. Other essays critique literary texts in several genres important to LDS writing, including the essay, folklore, and the novel. This volume has contributed significantly to the development of Mormon literature by spurring Mormon writers and literary scholars to greater effort: Lavina’s Preface to the volume records all the areas of Mormon literature—particularly poetry and drama—that needed additional examination.

Lavina’s third really extraordinary volume, published in 2011 by Signature, is Lucy’s Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir. As Lavina notes in the Introduction, this memoir is “Mormonism’s first family history and Mormonism’s first female autobiography.” In this critical edition, Lavina sets out to retrieve Lucy’s own voice, given that the text has been cut, appropriated, and revised by so many male editors with so many differing agendas. Lavina presents in parallel columns Lucy’s own manuscript and the first published version of the text, and uses footnotes to present the significant changes in other published versions. Thinking of additional possible scholarship, she suggests a number of critical lenses through which to examine the actual text Lucy Mack Smith authored in 1844-45.

For forty years Lavina Fielding Anderson has been a central figure in the creation and analysis of Mormon literature and history. Like the best editors, she has helped to shape truly remarkable and consciousness-changing texts without recognition or fanfare. It is our great pleasure to present her with the Smith-Pettit Award.

Full biography from Signature Books:

Lavina Fielding Anderson earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, and currently lives in Salt Lake City, where she raised her son with husband Paul Anderson. Anderson’s career includes work as editor of the Journal of Mormon History, and Ensign magazine, co-editor of the Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance, current-issues editor of the Mormon Women’s Forum Quarterly, associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and production editor for the Review of Higher Education. Anderson also edited several books, namely Chesterfield: Mormon Outpost in Idaho and Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective.

As an author, Anderson centered her writing and research on understanding and expanding the role of women in Mormon historical tradition. Her written work includes essays in Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature, On Their Own: Widows and Widowhood in the American Southwest, 1848-1939, Religion, Feminism, and Freedom of Conscience: A Mormon/Humanist Dialogue, The Wilderness of Faith: Essays on Contemporary Mormon Thought, and Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism. Amongst her numerous literary responsibilities, she also served as President of the Association of Mormon letters and earned the Grace Fort Arrington Award for Distinguished Service from the Mormon History Association.

Robert Kirby

The panel “Robert Kirby and Mormon Humor” will be held on March 23, 4:445-6:15, at the Education in Zion Theater in the Joseph F. Smith Building (JFSB) at BYU. The panel will include papers by Lynne Cropper, Ed Snow, and Shawn Tucker, and a response by Robert Kirby.

Robert Kirby, Salt Lake Tribune columnist and Mormon Humorist, has done more, save J. Golden Kimball only, for the salvation of Latter-day Saints from “boring speakers, meetings that last forever, music that sounds like whale sonograms, food storage gone bad and bickering over caffeine and movie ratings,”[1] than any other LDS humorist that ever lived.

In the short space of twenty-four years, Kirby has brought forth hundreds of newspaper columns and has been the means of publishing on at least two continents Sunday of the Living Dead and other Mormon humor collections, as well as two novels–Brigham’s Bees and Dark Angel–and a narrative history End of Watch: Utah’s Murdered Police Officers 1858-2003.

Kirby has brought forth revelations of folly and vice in Utah and LDS culture for the amusement and instruction of the children of women and men; gathered many thousands of the Latter-day Saints into meeting halls for hilarious speaking engagements; co-founded the New Mormon Humor; and left a fame and name that cannot be slain by the thousands of complaining emails he and the Salt Lake Tribune receive each week.

The Association for Mormon Letters thanks Robert Kirby for his many entertaining (and often serious) contributions to Mormon literature and, with great pleasure, hereby awards him with an Association for Mormon Letters Lifetime Achievement Award.

[1] Robert Kirby, “My Particles of Faith,” The Essential Kirby Canon (Salt Lake, 2014), pp. 137-138.

Full Kirby biography:

Robert Kirby was born in California in 1953 and moved at age six with his military family to Zaragoza, Spain, where the family lived until 1962. Following their return from Spain, the family lived at various military installations throughout the western United States, eventually settling in Salt Lake City. Kirby graduated from Skyline High School in 1971 and six months later joined a military police company in the Utah National Guard. From 1973 to 1975 he served an LDS mission to Uruguay, where he met Irene Jones of Calgary, Alberta, whom he later married in the Salt Lake Temple. After working as a stock clerk and a carpenter, in 1978 he joined the Grantsville Police Department and in July 1979 transferred to the Springville Police Department.

While attending night classes at Brigham Young University in 1983, Kirby was encouraged by an English professor to actively pursue writing. The following year he became a weekly columnist for the Springville Herald under the pseudonym of Mark Conroy. In 1988 he became a regular columnist for the Utah County Journal, writing law enforcement humor under the pseudonym of Officer ‘Blitz’ Kreeg, and the next year he left law enforcement to accept a job as editor of the Journal. During that employment he published two novels, Brigham’s Bees (Cedar Fort, 1991) and Dark Angel (Cedar Fort, 1992). A compilation of his police columns was published as Happy Valley Patrol in 1993.

At the Journal, Kirby wrote a column titled “Five Kinds of Mormons,” which began his strange odyssey as Utah’s “oxyMormon.” Because he persisted in lampooning Mormons, he was fired by the Journal in 1994. He then freelanced for three years, writing for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Salt Lake Tribune and the Daily Herald in Provo. In 1997 he accepted full-time employment with the Tribune, where he currently writes a weekly humor column.

Kirby has published six humor compilations lampooning Utah’s dominant culture, most of them in collaboration with Tribune editorial cartoonist Pat Bagley: Sunday of the Living Dead (Buckaroo Books, 1995), Wake Me for the Resurrection (Buckaroo Books, 1996), Pat & Kirby Go to Hell (Slickrock Books, 1997), Family Home Screaming (Slickrock Books, 1999), Kirby Soup for the Soul (White Horse Books, 2003), and The Essential Kirby Canon (Zion BookWorks, 2014). He also wrote End of Watch: Utah’s Murdered Police Officers, 1853-2003 (University of Utah Press, 2004), profiling the 56 policy officers killed in the line of duty in Utah since the Mormon pioneers arrived. He is the vice-president and historian for the Utah Law Enforcement Memorial, which holds annual services honoring police officers killed in the line of duty.

Today he commutes daily to the Tribune from Herriman via the Internet, and his frequent speaking engagements are primarily on the subject of coping with life in Utah.