Darlene Young was honored with the 2022 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. The award was presented on July 23 as part of the Association for Mormon Letters Virtual Conference. Angela Hallstrom interviewed Darlene, in a wide-ranging conversation about her career and her thoughts on literature. You can watch a video of the interview here. Below is the award citation, followed by a brief review of Darlene’s career up to this point. Thank you to the Smith-Pettit Foundation for providing funding for this award.
Early in her career, Darlene Young made a conscious decision to write about Latter-day Saint experience for a Latter-day Saint audience. “Mormonism is endlessly fascinating,” she has said. “It’s strange and wild and beautiful and, yes, sometimes frustrating and provincial and musty. It’s quirky and awesome (in the original definition of that word). . . .” Her vision that Mormon literature should encompass the depth and breadth of both Mormon life and the Mormon cosmos has not only shaped her achievement as a poet and essayist, it has also made her a generous leader in the field of Mormon letters. She is also a gifted teacher who has helped her students realize the potential of LDS literature.
Darlene has often published in LDS periodicals, where editors welcome expression of faith in creative works, and where her writing has been awarded prizes in virtually all the contests. She has won multiple honors in the BYU Mayhew Poetry Contest, the BYU English Department Hart-Larson Poetry Contest, and the BYU Studies Clinton F. Larson Poetry Contest. She has also won the BYU English Department Adjunct Publication Award, the BYU Studies Richard H. Cracroft Personal Essay Contest, the Mayhew Creative Nonfiction Contest, the BYU English Department Elsie C. Carroll Creative Nonfiction Contest, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and Dialogue’s Mary Lythgoe Bradford Award for Best Poem of the Year. She won the second-place award for young adult novels in the Utah Original Writing Competition. On a national level, Darlene has found journals sympathetic to both her poetry and essays and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her essay “Systole, Diastole” was cited as notable in Best American Essays 2019. Her poetry collection, Homespun and Angel Feathers, won the 2019 Association for Mormon Letters Poetry Prize. Indeed, she has demonstrated with her own work that the choice to write to and for Latter-day Saints is a legitimate avenue to superior art.
Homespun and Angel Feathers is her own best example of the excellence that can be achieved in Latter-day Saint literary art. In the poems of this collection, Darlene covers a range of topics: her husband, her teenaged sons, a chronic illness she suffered, her experiences at the temple, her release from a calling, and her attempt to love an obnoxious colleague. She contributes to the exploration of women’s experience with poems about Eve, the woman with an issue of blood, the Samaritan woman at the well, and Mary Magdalene at Christ’s tomb, as well as with poems about her own history. Her perspective tends towards the long view of life and eternity, often in poems that recognize 
her own maturity or that look back on her childhood, youth, and early marriage or forward to aging. The poems “Kintsukuroi for Joseph Smith” and “Shepherds” describe the joining of revelation and human earthiness—the first, of the young prophet, and the second, of the shepherds who received news of Christ’s birth. Some of her poems are humorous and ironic; some are holy. The poem “Gethsemane” is a profound meditation on Christ’s suffering and a great gift to Latter-day Saints. This rich tapestry of subjects demonstrates Darlene’s claim that “eons, constellations, temples—and the crumbs at the bottom of a church tote bag” all have a place in Latter-day Saint literature.
Another way Darlene has proven her commitment to LDS literary art is in the service she has rendered to the Latter-day Saint literary community. She has been the poetry editor of both Dialogue: A Journal of Modern Thought and Segullah. She served as secretary of the Association for Mormon Letters for eight years, where she worked with seven AML presidents. Throughout this time she kept meticulous notes of board meetings and annual conferences; she and Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury provided the continuity that kept the organization productive and effective for several years. She arranged, scheduled, and conducted annual conferences, award gatherings, and readings; encouraged others to participate as officers in the organization; and carried out the work of some who were unable to fulfill their responsibilities.
The Facebook group she started in 2018, MoPoWriMo (Mormon Poetry Writing Month), has been a great boon to Latter-day Saint poets. Every year since 2018, Darlene has challenged LDS poets to write a poem each day during the month of February (or to make whatever personal commitment s/he chooses) and to post the poems on the group site. She invites members to comment on each other’s poems, as long as the comments provide encouragement and insight. During the rest of the year, poets are welcome to post other poems for feedback, as well as to announce contests and publication opportunities. This Facebook group has given many poets a safe and inviting space to develop their skills and has resulted in the eventual publication of poetry collections by individual group members. Darlene continues to administer this Facebook site.
Additionally, Darlene has been a remarkable teacher of creative writing and of Latter-day Saint literature. In her introductory creative writing class, she wants her students to experience what it is to be a writer, so she has them read a great deal and write a great deal. Weekly self-evaluation assignments make students aware of their limitations and later their improvement. Student comments repeatedly mention that she knows them and their work well and therefore offers critiques they trust and follow, that she makes students work hard, and that in her class they improve as writers more than they thought possible. “I actually like poetry now,” one student wrote, the ultimate compliment.
For the LDS literature class, she uses historical texts to help her students recognize the richness of our literary tradition and the potential it offers. She also teaches students that reading creative works can be a moral act, and that there is a difference between literature-as-propaganda or as a tool of conversion and literature-as-art that explores human experience. She doesn’t impose a definition of art but encourages students to develop their own, an extremely important process for educating Latter-day Saint readers so that we will have an audience equal to our literature. It is true for all her students that her expansive vision of Mormonism—as a culture, a faith, and a world view—has led them to write in a far more authentic way about their own experiences within the Latter-day Saint community and their faith.
Darlene Young is something of a visionary, as was Orson F. Whitney when he said, “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.” Like Whitney, she believes in the potential of Latter-day Saints to create a body of truly great literature. She has devoted both time and talent to the development of that literature, and she has provided exemplary art that makes use of both the loftiness of our eternal doctrines and our humble and fumbling daily efforts to live up to them. It is our great good fortunate that we have a Darlene Young of our own, and it is a joy to present her with the 2022 Association for Mormon Letters Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters.
Darlene Young is the author of poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. Her poetry collection, Homespun and Angel Feathers received the AML Poetry Award in 2019. Her poetry has been anthologized in The Mother in Me (2008) The Best of Mormonism (2009), Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets (2011), Moth and Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death (2017), and other collections. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart prize and noted in Best American Essays. Darlene received her BA from Brigham Young University (1994) and, after raising her family, returned there for her MFA (2014). She teaches creative writing and technical writing at Brigham Young University.
Darlene has done important work in building and supporting the literary community. Besides her teaching, she served as the AML secretary from 2004 to 2011, helping to keep the organization alive over those years. She has served as the poetry editor for both Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Segullah. She created the MoPoWriMo (Mormon poetry writing month) Facebook group in 2017, where she continues to inspire and nurture fellow poets. She lives in South Jordan, Utah, with her husband and sons.
The Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters was established in 2005, and includes a monetary prize provided by the Smith-Pettit Foundation. In 2020 the AML board decided to transform the award to focus to excellent mid-career literary figures, encouraging them to continue producing artistic works of the highest quality.