We are pleased to announce the 2021 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Comics, Criticism, and Lyrics. The winners 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. The finalists and winners are chosen by juries of authors, academics, and critics. The announcements include descriptions of the works, usually adapted from the creators’ websites.
Comics
Shannon Hale and Leuyen Pham. Friends Forever. First Second
The third volume of the Friends graphic novel/memoir series. Shannon is in eighth grade, and life is more complicated than ever. Everything keeps changing, her classmates are starting to date each other (but nobody wants to date her!), and no matter how hard she tries, Shannon can never seem to just be happy. As she works through her insecurities and undiagnosed depression, she worries about disappointing all the people who care about her. Can she be the person everyone expects her to be? And who does she actually want to be?
Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham are best friends who have been publishing books for young readers for two decades, including the early chapter book Princess in Black series (with Dean Hale) and the picture book Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn. Shannon lives in Utah where she writes award-winning novels like The Goose Girl, Book of a Thousand Days, Dangerous, and the Newbery Honor winner Princess Academy, and pens other books with her husband Dean, including Diana, Princess of the Amazons, Rapunzel’s Revenge, and two novels about Marvel’s unbeatable Squirrel Girl. Shannon has received AML Awards for Emma Burning and Princess Academy. LeUyen is the author/illustrator of the books Big Sister, Little Sister, A Piece of Cake, The Itchy Book, and Outside, Inside, and the illustrator of over 100 books for kids. Her illustrations for Bear Came Along won the prestigious Caldecott Honor. Shannon and LeUyen shared the 2017 AML Comics Award for Real Friends.
Matt Page. Future Day Saints: The Gnomlaumite Crystal.
The second volume in the ongoing Future Day Saints saga, a utopian fantasy graphic novel that mixes Mormon culture, history, folklore, and mythology with 1980s cartoon and toy properties.
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 Mormonsanthology. In 2016 he illustrated and self published a children’s board book called B Is For Brains: An ABC book for the Zombie Apocalypse. Volume One of Future Day Saints won the 2020 AML Comics Award.
Mark Elwood. The Glass Looker: Collected Tales of Joseph Smith
The Glass Looker follows an ordinary farm boy named Joseph Smith who discovers he possesses the magical ability for seeing in stones. Learn the origin story of the American boy-prophet through illustrated accounts collected from Joseph, his family, neighbors and enemies.
Mark Elwood is an artist living in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta.
Criticism
Michael Austin. Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist. University of Illinois Press
Raised by devout Mormon parents, Vardis Fisher drifted from the faith after college. Yet throughout his long career, his writing consistently reflected Mormon thought. Beginning in the early 1930s, the public turned to Fisher’s novels like Children of God to understand the increasingly visible Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His striking works vaulted him into the same literary tier as William Faulkner while his commercial success opened the New York publishing world to many of the founding figures in the Mormon literary canon. Austin looks at Fisher as the first prominent American author to write sympathetically about the Church and examines his work against the backdrop of Mormon intellectual history. He illuminates the acclaimed author’s impact on Mormon culture, American letters, and the literary tradition of the American West.
Michael Austin is the executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Evansville. He was previously a professor of English. His many books include Rereading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem and We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America’s Civic Tradition. He has won two AML Awards for Religious Nonfiction and one for Criticism. He will be presented with this year’s AML Lifetime Achievement Award.
Barrett Burgin. “The Case for Resurrection: A Mormon Movie Manifesto.” In Mormonism and the Movies, edited by Chris Wei, BCC Press
Burgin, a filmmaker, analyzes the genre of Mormon movies since God’s Army in 2000, and argues for a new wave of LDS filmmaking, challenging creators to reclaim the movement in a more sincere and realistic way.
Barrett Burgin is a graduate of Brigham Young University and a filmmaker, best known for The Next Door (2016), Out of the Ground (2017), Father of Man (2019, AML Film Award), and the science-fiction mystery Cryo (2022). He has written extensively about the intersections between video games, ritual, new media, cinema, the afterlife, immortality, and technology.
Amy Easton-Flake. “Theologies of the Afterlife in Mormon Women’s Late-Nineteenth-Century Poetry.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife. Routledge
Poetry was a significant medium of public expression for nineteenth-century Mormon women, an acceptable place for them to express their views on home, family, community, politics, and theology. In the four hundred poems published in the Woman’s Exponent between 1872 and 1900, we find elements that connect the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ theology of the afterlife to more mainstream nineteenth-century Christian theologies, as well as beliefs that estrange Church members from other nineteenth-century Christians. Also, while Mormon men emphasize in their prose and poetry about the afterlife the opportunity to reign over heavenly kingdoms and create heavenly posterity, Mormon women focus most of their poems on the delight of reuniting with loved ones. These poems become a place where we can see Mormon women’s lived religion, as well as how women used poetry to create, validate, and promote their own religious experiences and their own visions of the afterlife.
Amy Easton-Flake is an Associate Professor of Ancient Scripture at BYU. She received her PhD in American literature from Brandeis University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s reform literature, Latter-day Saint “home literature” in relation to the larger print culture, the Book of Mormon through a narrative lens, and reception history of the Book of Mormon. Her article “Poetic Representations of Mormon Women in Late Nineteenth-Century Frontier America” won the 2019 AML Criticism Award, and she was the co-author of “Reconfiguring the Archive: Women and the Social Production of the Book of Mormon,” which won the 2021 Mormon History Association’s Best Article on Mormon Women’s History.
Adam McLain. “Mormonism in SF.” SFRA Review. 51:3, Summer 2021.
McLain edited a special section of SFRA Review, a journal published by the Science Fiction Research Association. It begins with McLain’s introductory essay, “A Critical Introduction to Latter-Day Saint Speculative Fiction,” and includes critical essays on speculative fiction by, for, or about Mormons by Carl Grafe, Alan Manning and Nicole Amare, Paul Williams, Kristin Perkins, Dale J. Pratt, Liz Busby, James H. Thrall, Rebekah Call, Ian McLaughlin, and Conor Hilton.
Adam McLain is a Harvard Frank Knox Traveling Fellow and is the Social Media Manager at Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He has a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and soon will begin a MA/PhD program at the University of Connecticut English Department.
Lyrics
The judges for this award considered lyrics from full-length albums released in 2020 and 2021.
David Archuleta. Therapy Sessions
David Archuleta became a star when he was just 16 years old, appearing on “American Idol Season 7, where he was the runner-up. Soon after, first single, ‘Crush’ debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Therapy Sessions is his ninth album.
Fragility is a collection of alternatingly sad/poignant and surreal/ecstatic songs. It has Asplund’s idiosyncratic melodies and harmonies featuring piano with alternately gorgeous and magical/weird engineering/production by Rob Buchert. Influences/comparisons include Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Jesca Hoop, prog, avant jazz. The title track was made into a stunning music video by dancer/choreographer Kate Monson and filmmaker Scott Cook.
Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer who teaches at the Brigham Young University School of Music. His interests have included the intersections of text/music, improvisation/composition, and modular textures/forms. His articles and chapters and a book have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, American Music, Illinois University Press, and University of Washington Press.
Emily Brown is a Californian songwriter and poet. Her impressive vocal range, wandering melodies, and conversational lyrical style have drawn frequent comparisons to Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill, and Fiona Apple.
Las Vegas-based rock band The Killers are considered one of the biggest rock bands of the 21st century, selling more than 28 million records worldwide. Brandon Flowers, the singer and lyricist, previously won the 2015 AML Lyrics Award for his solo album The Desired Effect. Pressure Machine, The Killers’ seventh studio album, contains songs with lyrics based on Flowers’ childhood in Nephi, Utah.
Andrew Wiscombe. Strangest Congregations
A folk musician based out of Utah, Andrew Wiscombe’s style has been referred to as foot-stompin’ street music. He showcases his musical talents in one-man band fashion, playing up to five instruments at once. A Berklee trained award-winning songwriter, Andrew has a unique ability to clothe stories, words, and emotions in American roots music. He is amarried father of two boys and former U.S. Army sniper. In Strangest Congregations, Andrew works to blend together the best parts of the American spirit into a melodic treasure chest we can keep on repeat.