We are pleased to announce the 2020 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Creative Nonfiction, Religious Nonfiction, Audiobook, and Podcasts. 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 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.
Creative Non-fiction
Patrick Madden. Disparates. University of Nebraska Press
In English disparate means “different” or “miscellaneous”—apt descriptors of these essays by Patrick Madden. In Spanish, however, disparate means “nonsense,” “folly,” or “absurdity,”—words appropriate to Madden’s goal of undercutting any notion that essays must be serious business. Thus, in this collection, the essays are frivolous and lively, aiming to make readers laugh while they think about such abstract subjects as happiness and memory and unpredictability.In this vein, Madden takes sidelong swipes at weighty topics via form, with wildly meandering essays, abandoned essays in honor of the long tradition of essayists disparaging their own efforts, and guerrilla essays—which slip in quietly under the guise of a borrowed form, abruptly attack, and promptly escape, leaving laughter and contemplation in their wake.
Patrick Madden teaches creative nonfiction at Brigham Young University. He is the author of two previous collections of essays, Sublime Physick (2016) and Quotidiana (2010), both of which were honored with AML Awards. He coedited After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (2015) and cotranslated Eduardo Milán’s Selected Poems (2012).
Caitlin Myer. Wiving: A Memoir of Loving Then Leaving the Patriarchy. Arcade
At thirty-six years old, Caitlin Myer is ready to start a family with her husband. She has left behind her Mormon upbringing and early sexual trauma and believes she is now living her happily ever after . . . when her body betrays her. In a single week, she suffers the twin losses of a hysterectomy and the death of her mother, and she is jolted into a terrible awakening that forces her to reckon with her past—and future. This is the story of one woman’s lifelong combat with a culture—her “escape” from religion at age twenty, only to find herself similarly entrapped in the gender conventions of the secular culture at large, conventions that teach girls and women to shape themselves to please men, to become good wives and mothers. The biblical characters Yael and Judith, wives who became assassins, become her totems as she evolves from wifely submission to warrior independence.
Caitlin Myer grew up in a half-finished mountainside house in Provo, Utah, the youngest of a chaotic family of six children, a poet mother, and an artist father. She founded the San Francisco literary reading series Portuguese Artists Colony and its publishing spinoff, PACBooks, where she served as editor. Her memoir/essays “Positive I Don’t Have a Uterus” and “Unforgettable: Becoming an Amnesiac’s Memory” were published in The Butter and Electric Literature, respectively. Her short story “Everything a Woman Should Have” appeared in Cultural Weekly, the poem “Bus Story” in No Tokens, and the story “God Time” in Joyland. She has appeared in storytelling series such as Porchlight and The Moth, and was featured on NPR’s The Moth Radio Hour with her real-life story, “Near Mrs.” She currently lives in Portugal.
Maleah Day Warner. Lies of the Magpie: A Memoir. Author Academy Elite
In her debut memoir, Maleah Warner uses humor, observation, and sensitivity to explore the struggles of finding success as a mother in the 21st century. In a work without awards, promotions, or a salary, how does a mother know she is successful? Pregnant with her fourth baby, Maleah frets that being a “stay-at-home mom” makes her inferior to women with paying jobs. To prove she can be a mother and a successful woman, Maleah says “yes” to everything including teaching early-morning seminary and starting a business from home. When she goes into labor while driving alone across the Arizona desert, she must decide whether to concede defeat and call for help or push forward to accomplish her master plan. After the distressing birth, while plagued with unrelenting thoughts of inadequacy, Maleah attempts to heal from postpartum depression without taking medication. Her search to save her body, her marriage, and her family leads to an unexpected revelation. Lies of the Magpie sweeps readers into the heart and mind of an accomplishment-driven woman who worries that being a mother isn’t enough as she journeys to uncover the surprisingly liberating and healing power of mothering.
Maleah Day Warner loves mothering and writing and tries to merge the two as often as possible. She’s an advocate for mothering resources and education, particularly in the diagnosis and treatment of postpartum depression. She volunteers with Postpartum Support International Utah and The Emily Effect. Lies of the Magpie is her first published work and the manuscript was a 2016 winner of the Utah Arts Council Original Writing Competition.
Religious nonfiction
Lavina Fielding Anderson. Mercy without End. Signature Books
These eighteen essays span more than thirty years of Lavina Fielding Anderson’s concerns about and reflections on issues of inclusiveness in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including her own excommunication for “apostasy” in 1993, followed by twenty-five years of continued attendance at weekly LDS ward meetings. Written with a taste for irony and an eye for documentation, the essays are timeless snapshots of sometimes controversial issues, beginning with official resistance to professionally researched Mormon history in the 1980s. They underscore unanswered questions about gender equality and repeatedly call attention to areas in which the church does not live up to its better self. Compassionately and responsibly, it calls Anderson’s beloved religion back to its holiest nature.
Lavina Fielding Anderson, president of Editing, Inc., is the former editor and/or copy editor of the Journal of Mormon History, the Association for Mormon Letters Annual, the Ensign, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. She is the editor of Lucy’s Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir (2001) and co-editor of the Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance. She he is the recipient of the Grace Fort Arrington Award for Distinguished Service (1991), the O. Marvin Lewis Award for Best Essay (1995), the Special Merit Award for Exceptional Service (1995), and co-recipient of the John Whitmer Historical Association award for Outstanding Bibliographical Essays (2005). She is one of the founders of the Association for Mormon Letters and received the Smith-Pettit Award for Contribution to Mormon Letters (2017).
Michael Austin. Buried Treasures: Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time. BCC Press
Over the course of a year, Michael Austin read the Book of Mormon for the first time in more than 30 years and wrote weekly blog posts detailing his insights and challenges with the text. The 44 essays in Buried Treasures, adapted from those original posts, show a trained scholar and literary critic grappling with the foundational text of his own religious tradition and finding surprising things that he had never seen before. The essays in this volume draw a picture of the Book of Mormon that is rarely seen in the devotional writings of those who consider it a scripture or the polemical writings of those who consider it a fraud. For Austin, the Book of Mormon, whatever its origin, is a complex literary and spiritual text full of sophisticated narratives, recurring patterns, and big ideas that can sustain a high level of critical analysis. Buried Treasures shows what happens when a well-trained reader approaches this text with fresh eyes and an open mind and unearths the treasures that have been hidden in plain sight for almost 200 years.
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 We Must Not Be Enemies, and 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 the 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.
William L. Davis. Visions in a Seer Stone; Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon. University of North Carolina Press
In this interdisciplinary work, Davis examines Joseph Smith’s 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith’s process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis’s interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith’s creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by George Whitefield and John Wesley.
William L. Davis, an independent scholar, holds a Ph.D. in theater and performance from UCLA, and has published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; John Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture; Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies; Style; Text and Performance Quarterly; and Textual Cultures.
Taylor G. Petrey. Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism. University of North Carolina Press
Petrey’s trenchant history takes a landmark step forward in documenting and theorizing about LDS teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage. Drawing on deep archival research, Petrey situates LDS doctrines in gender theory and American religious history since World War II. His challenging conclusion is that Mormonism is conflicted between ontologies of gender essentialism and gender fluidity, illustrating a broader tension in the history of sexuality in modernity itself.
Taylor G. Petrey, associate professor of religion at Kalamazoo College, is author of Resurrecting Parts: Early Christians on Desire, Reproduction, and Sexual Difference (2015) and is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender (2020). He received his ThD from Harvard Divinity School. He is the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming. The Book of Mormon For the Least of These, volume 1: 1 Nephi-Words of Mormon. BCC Press
This social justice commentary of the Book of Mormon empowers readers to understand the text as a book that speaks to issues of racism, sexism, immigration, refugees, and socioeconomic inequality. The Book of Mormon For the Least of These offers an unflinching examination of some of the difficult and troubling sections of the Book of Mormon, while also advocating for a compassionate reading of holy text. As a verse-by-verse close reading, this book examines new layers of interpretation and meaning, giving even those deeply familiar with scripture innovative tools for engaging powerfully with the Book of Mormon.
Fatimah Salleh was born in Brooklyn, NY. At 15, she joined the LDS Church, later served a mission in Campinas, Brazil and has taught LDS Institute. She received her PhD in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also earned a Master’s degree from Syracuse University in Public Communication and a second Master’s in Divinity from Duke University. She is the founder of A Certain Work, an organization dedicated to educating on issues of faith, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Margaret Olsen Hemming is the editor in chief of Exponent II, a quarterly magazine produced by Mormon feminists that has been publishing since 1974. She sits on the board of the Center for Latter-day Saint Art and has a deep love of Mormon women’s art. She lives in North Carolina with her spouse, three children, and a large vegetable garden.
Audiobook
The audiobook category is new to the AML Awards this year. Any audiobook released in 2020 can be considered, even if the book was otherwise published earlier. It covers both fiction and nonfiction books, including history.
D. J. Butler. Witchy War Series (Witchy Eye, Witchy Winter, Witchy Kingdom). Narrated by Courtney Patterson.
“Butler’s saga began with 2017’s Witchy Eye, which was followed swiftly in 2018 by Witchy Winter (winner of both the Association for Mormon Letters Best Novel Award and the Whitney Award for Speculative Fiction) and in 2019 by Witchy Kingdom. At their core, the books chart the progress of Sarah Calhoun, hidden daughter of the empress of the New World, as she battles to understand and claim her legacy. More widely, they explore the culture, theology, folklore, history and ritual practice of a wide gamut of early Americans and magical beings. Butler’s alternate America, filled with a mass of peoples and nations, sharply divided by differing interpretations of sacred texts and the nature of the cosmos, and steeped in ritual traditions and ways of seeing reality beyond the material, is a place where old things become new and all belief systems are seen as tantalizing hints in the direction of a greater whole. And while this world contains no Mormons, nearly every page resonates in fascinating ways with Latter-day Saint scripture and belief.”—Mattathias Westwood, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
D.J. (“Dave”) Butler grew up in swamps, deserts, and mountains. After messing around for years with the practice of law, he finally got serious and turned to his lifelong passion of storytelling. He now writes adventure stories for readers of all ages, plays guitar, and spends as much time as he can with his family. He is the author of City of the Saints, Rock Band Fights Evil, Space Eldritch, and Crecheling from Wordfire Press, and Witchy Eye, the AML Award and Whitney Award-winning Witchy Winter, and Witchy Kingdom from Baen Books.
Ann Chamberlin. Clogs and Shawls: Mormons, Moorlands, and the Search for Zion. Narrated by Jacqueline de Boer.
In this revealing family memoir, Ann Chamberlin explores the history of her Mormon grandmother Frances Lyda and her seven sisters who grew up desperately poor in Bradford, Yorkshire, in the early years of the twentieth century. Chamberlin’s narrative follows these eight daughters of Mary Jane Jones and Ralph Robinson Whitaker, a remarkably gifted yet poor and blind piano tuner. Most of the girls were forced by necessity to abandon school at age twelve and find work in terrible conditions at a local factory. When their mother converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1901, she became the backbone of the Mormon community in Yorkshire. Her daughters followed their mother into her faith, while navigating their own, sometimes tragic, ways into adulthood, family, and the world beyond industrial England. Though they were exploited and undereducated, the girls maintained a steadfast belief in a brighter future for the Mormon faithful, a mindset that, despite their many differences, forged an unshakable togetherness between them. All gifted and strong individuals in their own right, many of the Whitaker sisters overcame long odds and incredible hardships to carry on and prosper in Salt Lake City. Chamberlin interviewed her grandmother and six of her surviving great-aunts for Clogs and Shawls, the relatives who had made their way to Mormon Zion. She weaves novelistic passages with their first-person narratives to create a singular work of oral immigrant family history that is both lively and revealing.
Ann Chamberlin is the best-selling author of fourteen historical novels and numerous plays produced around the United States. Her recent books include The Book of Wizzy and The Sword and the Well trilogy. She has a degree in anthropology from the University of Utah.
Benjamin Park. Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. Narrated by Bob Souer.
In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Park excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, and in the process demonstrates that the Mormons are, in fact, essential to understanding American history writ large. A raucous, violent, character-driven story, Kingdom of Nauvoo raises many of the central questions of American history, and even serves as a parable for the American present. How far does religious freedom extend? Can religious and other minority groups survive in a democracy where the majority dictates the law of the land? The Mormons of Nauvoo, who initially believed in the promise of American democracy, would become its strongest critics. Park shows the many ways in which the Mormons were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates nineteenth century Mormon history into the American mainstream.
Benjamin E. Park received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and is an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University. His scholarship focuses on the religious, political, and cultural history of America between the Revolution and Civil War, often within an Atlantic context. His first book was American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in an Age of Revolutions (2018), and his most recent is the textbook A Companion to American Religious History (2021). He currently serves as a co-editor of the Mormon Studies Review, an interdisciplinary academic review journal. He is also one of the founding editors of Juvenile Instructor: A Group Blog on Mormon History.
Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming. The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, volume 1. Narrated by Margaret Olsen Hemming.
This social justice commentary of the Book of Mormon empowers listeners to understand the text as a book that speaks to issues of racism, sexism, immigration, refugees, and socioeconomic inequality.The Book of Mormon For the Least of These offers an unflinching examination of some of the difficult and troubling sections of the Book of Mormon, while also advocating for a compassionate understanding of holy text. As a verse-by-verse close study, this book examines new layers of interpretation and meaning, giving even those deeply familiar with scripture innovative tools for engaging powerfully with the Book of Mormon.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church History Department. Saints, Book 2, No Unhallowed Hand: 1846-1893. Narrated by Kirby Heyborne.
Saints is a narrative history written in an engaging style that will be accessible to both youth and adults. No Unhallowed Hand, the second of four volumes, narrates the Saints’ expulsion from Nauvoo, their challenges in gathering to the western United States and their efforts to settle Utah’s Wasatch Front. The second volume concludes with the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple.
Podcast
The podcast category is new to the AML Awards this year. The judges focused solely on podcast episodes published in 2020. Podcasts were required to have at least four episodes published last year to qualify. We want to acknowledge that the pandemic had an effect on podcast production, and, unfortunately, some podcasts that would have qualified in 2019 didn’t this year.
Because it was a new category, we cast a fairly wide net, searching various podcast platforms for any podcast that focused on Mormonism in any capacity as well as podcasts produced by Mormon-related/adjacent organizations and individuals who are known to be Mormon. Unsurprisingly, many of the podcasts in the Mormon space focus on current issues, interviews, or Mormon history. Of those, we focused on podcasts that either featured Mormon writers or used interesting storytelling techniques. In creating the final list, we judged on such criteria as production values, literary/narrative value, and relevance to the field of Mormon literature.
While they are not finalists, we also wanted to give a nod to podcasts that are doing interesting things in the space and are of special interest to Mormon literature, including Chapter and Verse (a daily poem on a verse or two of scripture); HIVE CAST (interesting production, strong focus on Mormon art); Face in Hat (in particular, the episode on the finale of The Good Place); and Zion’s Suffragists (especially the selection and presentation of documentary materials).
The Center’s Studio Podcast (Center for Latter-day Arts, Glen Nelson, host) https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/podcast-1
Just like the Center itself, the Center’s Studio Podcast’s purview includes visual art, performance art, and music. But it also produced several 2020 episodes focusing on literary topics and personalities, including an “Artists in the Pandemic” series and episodes featuring winners of the Center’s Art for Uncertain Times grants.
Dialogue Book Report (Dialogue Journal, Andrew Hall, host) https://www.dialoguejournal.com/dialogue-book-report/
While there are quite a few author interview podcasts in the Mormon space, The Dialogue Book Report is the one that does the best job of covering fiction, poetry, memoir, and other literary forms in detail. Whether focused on a single author or topic or ranging wide, this is a podcast that clearly loves Mormon literature.
Mattathias Reads the World (Mattathias Westwood, host) https://anchor.fm/mattathias/
A self-described “crappy podcast” (meaning it’s recorded unscripted and posted unedited), Mattathias Reads the World displays an unabashed enthusiasm for the world of Mormon literature. The podcast’s series of interviews and readings with Mormon Lit Blitz 2020 finalists is a must-listen.
Unfinished: Short Creek (Witness Docs from Stitcher, Ash Sanders and Sarah Ventre, hosts) https://www.witnesspodcasts.com/shows/unfinished-short-creek
Mormon history podcasts are quite popular and made up a large percentage of those we took a close look at. Unfinished: Short Creek stands out from the field for its focus, strong production values, and excellence in storytelling.