We are pleased to announce the 2018 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Drama and Poetry, and a Special Award in Publishing. The final awards will be announced and presented on March 30 at the AML Conference, held in Berkeley, California. We will be announcing the other category finalists over the coming week. The finalists and winners are chosen by juries of authors, academics, and critics. The announcements include book blurbs and author biographies, adapted from the author and publisher websites.
Drama
Matthew Greene. Good Standing. Plan-B Theatre Company. Salt Lake City, October 2018, and New York City, November 2018.
A gay Mormon faces excommunication in a “court of love” a week after marrying the man of his dreams. A solo play about faith, hope and catharsis featuring Austin Archer in 16 roles, including the entire High Council and Stake Presidency.
Matthew Greene’s play Adam and Steve and the Empty Sea was named “Best Original Play” by the 2013 Salt Lake City Arty Awards. His other plays include Job Well Done (national finalist, American College Theatre Festival), Bread of Affliction (Society for the Study of Jewish American and Holocaust Literature) and #Mormoninchief (New York International Fringe Festival). His film Boy With Blue was awarded Best of Fest at the Oceanside Film Festival. His 2016 play Gregorian was an AML Award finalist. He currently works as a teaching artist with Opening Act, an organization that provides theatre education to underserves high schools. A California native, Matthew earned a B.A. in Theatre at Brigham Young University and currently lives in New York City.
Ariel Mitchell. The Shower Principle. New York Theater Festival, March, 2018.
The Shower Principle is a one woman led experiment into motherhood. Taking place over the six weeks of her maternity leave from an engineering position at a dental tool company, Liz discusses trials, challenges, shifts, and joys in her new occupation.
Ariel Mitchell hails from a small island in the Chesapeake Bay. She 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 Give Me Moonlight, inspired by Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley, and 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. It will be performed by the THML Theatre Company in New York City in March 2019. 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.
Poetry
Lara Candland. The Lapidary’s Nosegay. University of Colorado Press.
Lara Candland presents to readers a bouquet of resplendent poems that she created, collaged, curated, and reimagined by using the rich floral and gem imagery in the poetry of Emily Dickinson as her primary source material. Dickinson and Candland share linguistic and theological roots in the Bible, nineteenth-century American Protestantism, and a lexicon distinctive to their specific individuarian communities, and this collection of poems draws a serpentine kind of map across nearly two centuries, journeying from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Provo, Utah, from Dickinson’s severe and lush New England to Candland’s own jagged, harsh, and stunning high desert Utah. The Lapidary’s Nosegay explores the ways that both poets have simultaneously challenged and embraced the axiomatic constraints of religion, landscape, and cultural conventions and expectations of each poet’s time and place.
Lara Candland is a poet, musician, singer, and co-founder of and chief-librettist for the Seattle Experimental Opera. Her work has appeared in Fence, Colorado Review, and many other journals. Her first book, Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree, was published in 2010, and her performance with Lalage—poetry and live electronic looping and manipulations—appears on the CD Lalage: Live on Sornarchy. Her opera Sunset with Pink Pastoral was a finalist in the Genesis Prizes for New Opera.
Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows. University of Tampa Press.
Prose poetry. “There’s a slantwise echo of the garden in all of Larsen’s poetry. In its fascination with the natural world, both domestic and wild, there’s a longing to connect with the creation, with the other, and with God.” (from a profile of Larsen in Image)
Mother Teresa This, Mother Teresa That
Like a salty sailor, my son cusses his way out of bed and into the morning. Stubbed toe and no hot water, MotherTeresa. Burnt bagel, Mother Teresa. What a devious bride of Christ, orchestrating my son’s failures from the other side. She who blessed Calcutta lepers makes him run a stop sign bang in front of a cop. She who won a Nobel scrambles his brain smack before a quiz on Brave New World. Mother Teresa, and againMother Teresa. Like God and teenage lust, she floats everywhere. What versatility! Dear Sainted Sister, forgive my son the way he takes your name in vain, for just as often he is moved to praise. From our roof, he scopes glorious nebulae: Mother Teresa. Cheese cake dripping with his favorite sea salt caramel: Mother Teresa. No higher rave. And that diva from marching band, trim as the trombone she plays, hair French-braided into licks of gold, ah queen of queens, watch her throw that arm around, Sweet Mother Teresa.
Lance Larsen received a PhD from the University of Houston in 1993. He is the author of four previous poetry collections: Genius Loci (University of Tampa Press, 2013); Backyard Alchemy (University of Tampa Press, 2009, AML Award); In All Their Animal Brilliance (University of Tampa Press, 2005), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and an AML Award; and Erasable Walls (New Issues, 1998). In 2012 Larsen was named to a five-year term as the poet laureate of Utah. He has also received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an AML Lifetime Achievement Award. He currently serves as the chair of the Department of English at Brigham Young University.
Javen Tanner. The God Mask. Kelsay Books.
“Informed by Classical drama, European literature, and the Bible, the poetry of Javen Tanner in The God Mask reveals a man in middle age grappling with the archetypes of heroes in a world that has lost belief in them. The voice of the poems searches for a theory of everything—a hypothetical link of truth connecting the Greeks to Shakespeare to the Garden of Eden to contemporary American life in the Rocky Mountains. An elegant, natural storyteller, Tanner’s poems are dramas and parables whittled down to their bones.” Glen Nelson, founder and director, Mormon Artists Group.
Yorick
A cold spell for my desecration slipped upward
from your grave. Some ceremony attended you:
pinyon bead, arrowhead, broken pottery and bone.
Only your empty sockets saw that this was all vanity.
Your epitaph faded on the wall above you:
A fleeing antelope, meaning hunger, flesh, struggle.
A weeping god, meaning wisdom, purity, loneliness.
Three handprints, open and empty, meaning gone, gone, gone.
My civility was lost in the subtle shock of history.
Wild again, I felt mortality in everything: the scratch
of sagebrush, the desolation of cattle fences,
the low swoop of the red-tailed hawk.
I raised your skull to mine. I stalled and stuttered
on the profound questions I was taught to ask.
“Shhhh,” you answered, as sand fell through your teeth.
Javen Tanner’s poems have appeared in Roanoke Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Dialogue, The Raintown Review, Irreantum, Sunstone, and several other journals and magazines. His chapbook Curses for Your Sake was published by the Mormon Artists Group Press (New York, 2006). He was the winner of the 2011 Irreantum poetry contest, and several of his poems were included in the Fire in the Pasture anthology. Javen’s work has been set to musical compositions, has been the subject of a paper delivered at the Sunstone Symposium, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His play The King’s Men was an AML Drama Award finalist in 2016. He currently lives in Salt Lake City, where he is the Artistic Director of The Sting & Honey Company and the Dean of Arts at The Waterford School.
Kristen Tracy. Half-Hazard. Graywolf Press.
Half-Hazard is a book of near misses, would-be tragedies, and luck. As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, “Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes.” The collection follows Tracy’s wide curiosity, from her growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus out into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism and Tracy’s own knack for noticing what’s so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.it was a stone inside of me. The next day,
this was not so and never would be again.
I had no say. I began life,
heaven or not, ten steps away
from a brick church as a half-blonde anyone.
What I am, my soft shoreline, my need
to unlock doors and move
from one train seat to the next,
has saved me.
—from “Bountiful, Utah, 1972”
Special Award in Publishing
Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, Martin Pulido, editors. Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. Peculiar Pages.
Dove Song is an anthology of poetry and art centered on the Mormon concept of Heavenly Mother. It includes 138 poems from 80 poets and artists from the early church, to the late 20th Century to today. The Poetry Award judge has decided to honor this achievement with a Special Award in Publishing.