We are pleased to announce the 2022 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Comics, Poetry, and a Special Award in Publishing: Republication. The final awards will be announced and presented on April 29, as part of the 2023 Association for Mormon Letters Virtual Conference.
The Special Award in Publishing: Republication recognizes three efforts in 2022 to bring back into print significant works of literature by Mormon authors. In addition to carefully reproducing the historical texts, all three editors also wrote explanatory material to analyze and contextualize the works for contemporary audiences.
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, usually adapted from the author and publisher websites.
Comics
Mark Elwood. The Glass Looker: Volume 2. Luman Books
Joseph Smith’s story continues in this second installment, where he undertakes use of his new seer stone and begins a quest to obtain a buried record of an ancient people, again as illustrated directly from historical 
sources. More than 250 pages, including maps, end notes, and sketchbook pages.
Mark Elwood is an artist living in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta. The Glass Looker: Volume 1 was a 2021 AML Comics Award finalist.
Rachel Allen Everett. The Manderfield Devil. Independently published.
Cautionary fantasy meets noir murder mystery in this 37-page one-shot, a comic inspired by Hellboy and the Twilight Zone.
Rachel Allen Everett (Rae for short) is an illustrator, writer, and small press comic book creator from Mapleton, Utah. Rae’s work is inspired by classic Americana, scifi, and fantasy. She loves to build immersive worlds which thematically explore the relationship between the secular and spiritual. Aside from personal projects like The Manderfield Devil and 13 Light-Years Away, Rae illustrated book 5 in the scifi children’s series Digital Lizards of Doom, as well as a few short comics for scifi and horror anthologies like From the Static and Another New World. Having recently graduated with her BFA in Illustration from Brigham Young University, Rae has only just started to break into the comics industry, and is looking forward to bringing you more stories.
Doug Wagner (writer) and Tim Odland (artist). Beware the Eye of Odin. Image Comics
Helgi, the prince of a Viking village, has stumbled upon the cursed Eye of Odin. If he doesn’t return it to its rightful owner by the new moon, he will die an agonizing death of boils and decay. By his side are Stigr, a one-armed warrior past his prime, and Kadlin, a female warrior convinced she’s a Valkyrie. Their only path will take them through the treacherous lands of the Hundrafolk, Trolls, and Dwarven Smiths.
Doug Wagner is a comic book writer best known for his creator-owned works on Image Comics’ Vinyl, Plastic, The Hard Place, and The Ride: Burning Desire. Over the past 15 years, Doug has written for such companies as The CW Network, CBS, DC Comics, Image Comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Top Cow Productions, and 12-Gauge Comics. He currently resides somewhere in the mountains of Utah. Tim Odland is a comic book illustrator and designer.
Noah Van Sciver. Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Abrams ComicArts
In Joseph Smith and the Mormons, author and illustrator Noah Van Sciver covers one of history’s most controversial figures, Joseph Smith. The book discusses all of the monumental moments during Smith’s life, including the anti-Mormon threats and violence which caused his followers to move from New York to Ohio, Smith’s receiving the divine commandment of plural marriage, his imprisonment, his announcement to run for president of the United States, and his ultimate murder by an angry mob in 1844 at the young age of 38. With a respectful and historical approach, and strikingly illustrated, this graphic novel is the ultimate book for those curious about the origins of the Mormon faith and the man who started it all.
Noah Van Sciver is widely considered one of the most notable cartoonists of his generation, and first came to national attention in 2006 with his critically acclaimed anthology comic book series Blammo, which earned him three Ignatz Award nominations. His work has appeared in MAD magazine, the Comics Journal, Best American Comics, and The Stranger, as well as numerous anthologies. Van Sciver is the author of multiple critically acclaimed graphic novels, including The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln, Youth Is Wasted, Saint Cole, and Fante Bukowski. His autobiographical graphic novel One Dirty Tree won the 2018 AML Comics Award. Van Sciver lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
Poetry
Tyler Chadwick. Litany with Wings. BCC Press
Litany with Wings is a book of contemplation and revelation. Poet Tyler Chadwick meditates on a range of ideas central to his Mormon faith—the work of creation (divine and human), family life, community, grace, loss, memory, faith, scripture, prayer, theosis, godhood, and the divine feminine. Tyler breathes life into his ruminations using vivid—sometimes irreverent—language and imagery that draw from, riff on, and respond to his faith tradition, his life experience, his encounters with other cultures, and the works of several artists and poets. In the process, Tyler pulls back the veil, affording his readers a rare glimpse of the god-bodies who are dancing, art-making, laughing, and chattering in the very next room.
Tyler Chadwick, an award-winning writer, editor, and teacher, received his PhD in English and the Teaching of English from Idaho State University. He teaches writing at Utah Valley University. Both poetry anthologies he edited, Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets (2011) and Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry (2018) were given AML poetry awards. He is also the author of Field Notes on Language and Kinship (2013), a collection of poetry and essays, and was a 2017 AML Criticism Award finalist for his study of the poetry of Alex Caldiero. He lives in Ogden, Utah, with his wife, Jess, and their four daughters.
Rio Cortez. Golden Ax. Penguin
From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family’s history as “Afropioneers” in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures. In poems that range from wry, tongue-in-cheek observations about contemporary life to more nuanced meditations on her ancestors–some of the earliest Black pioneers to settle in the western United States after Reconstruction–Golden Ax invites readers to re-imagine the West, Black womanhood, and the legacies that shape and sustain the pursuit of freedom.
Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Rio Cortez is the New York Times bestselling author of The ABCs of Black History (Workman, 2020) and I Have Learned to Define a Field As a Space Between Mountains, winner of the 2015 Toi Dericotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Her honors include a Poets & Writers Amy Award, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Canto Mundo, The Jerome Foundation, and Poet’s House. Rio holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University.
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky. Drift Migration. Ashland Poetry Press
This collection of poems meditates on the intersection of landscape, myth, and loss from various imagistic perspectives that weave mythic lyric with distinctly feminine narrative poems. The poems explore relationships, loss, trauma, and a sense of place from the lush green of the south to the stark red rock of the southwest.
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Southern Utah University where she directs an Ecopoetry and Place writing conference. She is the author of the chapbook Ruin and Light (2015), and the limited-edition/letterpress art book Invisible Shores (2017). She also co-edited, with Karin Anderson, the Torrey House Press anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild, which was a 2021 AML Creative Nonfiction Award finalist. Her poems have been published in Terrain.org, Pilgrimage, Sugar House Review, Salt Front, Cave Wall, Contrary Magazine, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. Her essay, “Juliet,” won the 2020 Mississippi Review Nonfiction Prize.
Scott Hales. Hemingway in Paradise and other Mormon Poems. Mormon Lit Lab
What is the spirit world like? Can you rob a bank there? Can you fall in love? Hemingway in Paradise and Other Mormon Poems, the debut poetry collection of Scott Hales, explores these questions—and many others—as it takes readers on a rollicking trek across distinct latter-day landscapes, speculative worlds where Ernest Hemingway watches his language, Christopher Columbus sails the icy oceans of hell, and an early Mormon apostle chases down a stone giant.
Scott Hales is a writer and historian for the Church History Department. He has a BA in English from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati. He is the literary editor and writer for Saints, the four-volume history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He received a 2013 AML Award for his comic The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, and has been an AML Award finalists for his comics and literary criticism three times. He specializes in American literature with research interests in Mormonism, utopianism, and historical fiction. He lives in Eagle Mountain, Utah, with his wife, Sarah, and their five children.
Kimberly Johnson. Fatal. Persea Books
In Fatal, her most personal collection yet, Kimberly Johnson reflects on ways in which we are imperiled, this life dealing out even in its “small and common” events so many shocks and wounds that we are marked by our having lived it. These poems explore our enduring commitment to care for our small, costly holdings–all those vital, fatal loves that make us vulnerable–and contemplates the question of how we can bear the caring, knowing the risk.
Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her work has appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, PMLA, and Modern Philology. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, Leviathan with a Hook (AML Poetry Award, 2002), A Metaphorical God (2008), and Uncommon Prayer (AML Poetry Award finalist, 2014), and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Utah Arts Council, and the Mellon Foundation. She is Professor of English at Brigham Young University.
Special Award in Publishing: Republication
Anne-Marie Wright Lampropoulos. A Vision Splendid: The Discourses of David O. McKay. Greg Kofford Books
During his forty-five years as an LDS apostle and nineteen years as the prophet, David O. McKay gave thousands of speeches, including hundreds of temple and chapel dedications, civic addresses, funeral sermons, and General Conference and other Church-related talks. Many of these speeches contain some of the same prose and poetry, but no two speeches are the same. All of these discourses were written by McKay himself. His choice of prose reveals his favorite authors and literature, a glimpse into his personal library. It also conveys his ideals and his fervent belief in their truth. Never before, and not since, has The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a prophet so well versed in secular as well as scriptural prose. McKay’s intellectual and spiritual worlds meshed as he recited with ease the poetry of Edgar A. Guest, John Oxenham, and Joaquin Miller, as well as the patriotic pronouncements of George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin. In one speech he seemed to have studied Scottish lore, and in another he effortlessly extolled current US statistics on crime or divorce. He was at times romantic and wistful, and at other times firm and warning. In A Vision Splendid, Anne-Marie Wright Lampropoulos culls from the vast records of McKay’s discourses that Middlemiss kept and groups certain categories of speeches together. Each chapter broadly analyzes a category and then includes samples of illustrative full speeches. This analysis and compilation illustrates how McKay looked to poignant prose for a sense of his own personal identity and inspiration, as well as the larger identity and inspiration of Church members.
Anne-Marie Wright Lampropoulos is the author of A Bundle of Choices: The Option Overload of LDS Women Today, and has written for several newspapers, magazines, and journals. She served as the Vice President of Corporate Communications at Merit Medical Systems Inc. for sixteen years and worked as Deputy Director of Communications for the New York City Council during Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration. Anne-Marie earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Journalism. She has three children and lives in Salt Lake City.
Joe Monson. The Bacillus of Beauty, by Harriet Stark. Hemelein Publications
Helen Winship moved to New York to pursue her studies in biology. John Burke, her fiancé, arrives in the Big Apple to find she has transformed into the most beautiful woman in the world thanks to an experimental microbial treatment given to her by her professor. The treatment is successful beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, catapulting Helen into high society as every man wishes to be near her. Will her outlook on life be changed? Will John be able to keep her love despite all of the attention she receives now from other potential suitors? How long will Helen’s newfound dazzling beauty last? Find out in this classic tale from an early science fiction writer. The Bacillus of Beauty is a science fiction novel by Harriet Stark, originally published in 1900. Joe Monson includes an forward about the history and content of the novel, and a biography of Stark.
Joe Monson is the creator and managing editor of Hemelein Publications, where since 2019 he has published science fiction, fantasy, light horror, and detective adventure stories. He is the editor of many recent anthologies through the publisher, including the LTUE Benefit Anthologies series with Jaleta Clegg.
Ardis E. Parshall. The Corianton Saga. BCC Press
The Corianton Saga, edited by the inimitable Ardis E. Parshall, represents years of careful archival work, transcribing, and editing a series of documents that, taken together, tell one of the weirdest and most wonderful stories in the Mormon Universe. The saga began in 1889, when B.H. Roberts, recently called to the First Council of the Seventy, set the ball in motion by serializing a 17,000-word novella called Corianton in the Contributor. Another novella, A Ship of Hagoth, by Julia MacDonald, was published in the Young Woman’s Journal. Orestes Utah Bean took both Roberts and MacDonald’s novellas and worked them into a stage play that toured the country in 1902 as Corianton: An Aztec Romance, and a revised version played on Broadway in 1912. In in 1931, Bean teamed up with Lester and Byron Parks to produce Corianton: A Story of Unholy Love, an early talking picture and perhaps the first work of commercial Mormon film. Bean’s widow Zoan Bean, who tried to keep her husband’s great idea alive in the form of a television script, Out of the Dust (c. 1960). Parshall brings together all of these texts, and provides explanatory materials.
Ardis E. Parshall is a historian, freelance researcher, and author specializing in Mormon history. She co-edited with Paul Reeve Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia, co-edited with Michael Austin The Mormon Image In Literature and Josephine Spencer: Her Collected Works, Vol. 1, 1887-1899 (2020 AML Criticism Award finalist), and co-wrote with James Goldberg Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic. She has created over 8000 Mormon history posts at her Keepapitchinin‘ blog, wrote five years of Mormon history columns for the Salt Lake Tribune, contributed to public history projects like Century of Black Mormons, and created the ongoing “Who We Lost” series. The Mormon History Association created the Ardis E. Parshall Public History Award in her honor.