We are pleased to announce the 2021 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Novel and Short Fiction, as well as a Special Award in Fiction. The final awards will be announced and presented on July 23, as part of the Association for Mormon Letters Virtual Conference. We will be announcing the other category finalists over the coming week, including Comics, Creative Nonfiction, Criticism, Drama, Film, Lyrics, Middle Grade Novel, Picture Book, Podcast, Poetry, Religious Nonfiction, and Young Adult Novel. The finalists and winners are chosen by juries of authors, academics, and critics. The announcements include book blurbs and author biographies, usually adapted from the author and publisher websites.
The AML Board decided to set up panels that are bilingual in English and Spanish for the 2021 novel and short fiction awards. To correct past oversights, it was decided that the panels would consider Spanish-language works published since 2016 which were not considered in previous years for the 2021 awards.
Special Award in Fiction
Gabriel Gonzalez Nunez. Estampas del Libro de Mormón
The idea for this collection of biographical sketches of characters from the Book of Mormon came from Estampas de la Biblia by the Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou, who in 1934 published a collection of forty brief dramatic monologues featuring characters from the Old Testament. Bold and different, Estampas del Libro de Mormón is a work that transgresses boundaries. Through a prose that carries the scent of poetry, this book collects roughly thirty biographical sketches of characters who have been lost in the story of the ancient Americas. Its pages are imprinted with the voices of parents and children, martyrs and soldiers, people both great and small. Story after story, the narrations in this book invite us to reflect on the things that most matter in life, such as family, faith, heritage, and peace. It was published in Spanish in 2017.
Gabriel González Núñez is originally from Montevideo, Uruguay. He earned his Ph.D. in Translation Studies at KU Leuven, has an M.A. in Translation and Intercultural Studies from Universitat Rovira I Virgili, and a J.D. from Brigham Young University. He is a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where he trains translators and interpreters. His love of literature has led him to become instrumental in the publishing of El Pregonero de Deseret, a newsletter about Latter-day Saint literature in Spanish. His poetry collection Ese golpe de luz was an AML Poetry Award finalist in 2020, and his short fiction collection Rumbos was published in 2021. In addition, he’s authored several children’s books in his home country.
Novel
D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchie. The Jupiter Knife. Baen
A sequel to the depression-era fantasy The Cunning Man. Hiram and his son Michael are dowsing a well in Eastern Utah when they hear a cry of help from the ghost of a small boy, torn to pieces by wild animals. Before they can even begin to look into that tragedy, however, a prosperous local rancher is murdered right before their eyes. In an attempt to both help the ghost and find the killer, Hiram and Michael must navigate an eccentric cast of characters that includes failed bank robbers, a seductive fortune-teller, an inept sheriff, a crazy prospector, and a preacher with an apocalyptic grudge against the Roosevelt administration. The mystery, however, isn’t just in the hearts of men. There’s an astrological puzzle that Michael, now his father’s apprentice, must solve. Meanwhile, the murderer is moving slowly against Hiram and Michael, forcing them into a trap from which there is no escape.
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, The Kidnap Plot (2016 AML Middle Grade finalist) and Witchy Winter (winner of the 2018 AML Novel Award). Aaron Michael Ritchey is the author of twenty-one novels and numerous pieces of short fiction. He was born on a cold and snowy September day in Denver, Colorado, and while he’s lived and travelled all over the world, he’s a child of the American West.
R. de la Lanza. Eleusis:The Long and Winding Road. Intendencia de las Letras/Ulterior Editorial
Weaving together the tales of two multigenerational sets of Mormon characters, the novel embraces the grand sweep of Mexico’s Mormon history. There’s a cameo by Melitón González Trejo, a depiction of the divisions around the schismatic Third Convention, friendships formed at the Benemérito academy. Through it all, de la Lanza shows a consistent interest in both the earthy, messy realities of his characters’ lives and the spiritual longings that pull at them, no matter how they may drift from their principles. The novel’s name, a reference to the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, promises a sacred story of descent and ascent. With the help of classical and scriptural allusions, de la Lanza keeps that promise, inviting us to take a look at the long and winding road through mortality to transcendence. Eleusis was first published in Spanish by Intendencia de las Letras in 2016, and a Spanish ebook version was published by Ulterior Editorial in 2017. An English translation of the first two chapters by James Goldberg was published in Dialogue: A Journal o Mormon Thought, Spring 2021.
R. de la Lanza (Mexico City, 1977) holds a degree in Classics and has worked as a college and university professor teaching literature and communication. He is a literature journalist, screenwriter, literary editor, and fiction writer. He has also composed music for home video films. He lovesmythology and philosophy and is an enthusiastic reader of psychoanalysis. Eleusis is his first published novel.
Todd Robert Petersen. Picnic in the Ruins. Counterpoint
A madcap caper across the RV-strewn vacation lands of southern Utah meets a meditation on mythology, authenticity, the ethics of preservation, and one nagging question: “who owns the past?” Anthropologist Sophia Shepard is researching the impact of tourism on cultural sites in a remote national monument on the Utah-Arizona border when she unexpectedly crosses paths with two small-time criminals. The Ashdown brothers were hired to steal maps from a “collector” of Native American artifacts, but instead of delivering as promised, the brothers are out to strike it rich. But their ineptitude has alerted the local sheriff to their presence–and forced their employer, a former lobbyist seeking lucrative monument land that may soon be open to energy exploration, to send a fixer to clean up their mess before it upsets her machinations.
Todd Robert Petersen studied Film at the University of Oregon, creative writing at Northern Arizona University, and then moved on to Oklahoma State to study creative writing and critical theory with Brian Evenson. He is the author of a short story collection and three novels, one of which, Rift, won the 2009 AML Novel Award. Petersen currently resides in Cedar City, Utah, where he is a Professor of English and the Director of Project-Based Learning Southern Utah University.
Juan Antoni
o Santoyo. Noria. Ulterior Editorial
Noria is told from the point of view of a boy at the dawn of puberty, describing the steps of his sexual awakening, his spiritual questions, and his troubles with love during a winter vacation in Acapulco. The interior monologue of this precocious and inconveniently lucid youngster seems to emerge like a nostalgic evocation from the peaceful shores of an adulthood in which his heart is not fully healed. It was published in Spanish in 2020.
Juan Antonio Santoyo (Mexico City, 1970) is a concert pianist who teaches music at the Conservatorio de las Rosas and Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, Mexico. Music, the great impulse of his life, has led him to explore and scrutinize the most refined veins of universal culture. A Mexican patriot, musicologist, Germanist, political scientist and historian, he recently ventured into the world of letters with the publishing of Noria. Santoyo is also the editor of the weekly literary-political quarterly Umbrales, in Morelia.
Short Fiction
Riley Clay. “Good Shepherd Church”. Irreantum 17:2
Riley Clay has studied education, history, and Spanish at University College London and Brigham Young University. His work has been featured by The Copperfield Review, The International Association for Visual Culture, and the Association for Mormon Letters Conference.
James Goldberg. “Between Glory and Ruin”. A Desolating Sickness: Stories of Pandemic
James Goldberg has won AML Awards for Drama (The Prodigal Son, 2008), Novel (The Five Books of Jesus, 2012), and a special award for Thorns and Thistles: A Concert of Literature (2019). Other publications include the poetry collections Let Me Drown With Moses (2015, AML Poetry finalist), Phoenix Song, Book of Lamentations, and Song of Names. Recent co-authored books are the 2021 YA novel The Bollywood Lovers’ Club and the 2022 memoir The Burning Book. Goldberg has taught persuasive and creative writing at BYU and has written for the LDS Church History Department.
Rachel Helps. “Skillick’s Bride”. A text-based interactive feminine Mormon horror game.
Rachel Helps is the Coordinator of Wikipedia Initiatives at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library, and helped write Space to Grow, a parenting sim set on a foreign planet. After experiencing the story, you might want to read Helps’ Skillick’s Bride post-mortem.
Spencer Hyde. “The Wall”. Image #110
Spencer Hyde’s stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Bellevue Literary Review, Five Points, and elsewhere. He won the 2015 AML Short Fiction Award for “Remainder”, was a AML short fiction finalist again in 2016, and a finalist for AML Young Adult Novel for Waiting for Fitz in 2019. He teaches creative writing and literature at Brigham Young University.
Mario R. Montani. “Y no preguntes mas . . .” Irreantum 17:2. In Spanish. English translation, “So Ask no More . . .“, translated by Gabriel González.
Mario R. Montani lives in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. He studied Humanities at Argentina’s National University of the South. His short story collection El Castillo Gris y otros cuentos (The Gray Castle and Other Stories) was published by Editorial Dunken in 2009. He has been a member of Cofradía de Letras Mormonas, a group that promotes literature among Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints, since 2015. He keeps a personal blog titled Mormosofia, where he discusses religious art, theology, and philosophy within Mormon culture. He currently serves as the Multi-Stake Director of Public Affairs and Communications in the Bahía Blanca area.