We are pleased to announce the 2023 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Novel and Short Fiction, as well as a Special Award in Short Fiction. The final awards will be announced and presented on July 20, as part of the 2024 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, 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.
Novel
Karin Anderson. What Falls Away. Torrey House.
Cassandra Soelberg, pregnant at seventeen, was cast out of her community by religious leaders. Returning to her rural Utah hometown after nearly forty years to care for her senile mother, she meets a young man with an uncanny resemblance to the father of the child she was forced to give up for adoption. Drawn back into traumatic scenes of young adulthood, she must reconcile with her past in the fiercely beautiful landscapes that shaped her. What Falls Away is a stunning novel about family, art, and the raw process of healing.
Karin Anderson is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, and heretic, as well as the author of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. Her work has appeared in places such as Dialogue, Western Humanities Review, and American Literary Review. A former professor of English at Utah Valley University, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and holds degrees from Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah.
John Bennion. Ruth at the End of the Earth. BCC Press.
“If you thought that what Dune‘s Paul Muad’Dib needed was a provident Mormon family’s food storage, have I got a thrilling adventure tale for you. A cold-eyed and terrifying vision of a future southwest, Ruth at the End of the Earth is Dune on a human scale, Mad Max with Mormons in the red rock country. Stripped of all pretense and civilization, bound and driven by their own ancestors, a man and a woman fight the world and each other to survive the burning desert at the end of time.” —DJ Butler, author of Witchy Eye and Abbott in Darkness.
A native of the Utah desert, John Bennion has published a collection of 
short fiction, Breeding Leah and other Stories (1991), and the novels Falling Toward Heaven (2000), An Unarmed Woman (2019), Ezekiel’s Third Wife (2019), and Spin (2022). He has retired from teaching creative writing in the English Department at Brigham Young University, where he developed the Experiential Writing Project, sponsored by the Humanities College at BYU. He is the recipient of the 2021 Association for Mormon Letters Lifetime Achievement Award.
Theric Jepson. Just Julie’s Fine. BCC Press.
Hilarious, subversive, reflective, and poignant, this novel is a revolving portrait that perfectly captures the BYU single experience and the internal and external tensions faced by Latter-day Saint women. –Katherine Cowley, award-winning LDS author.
Just Julie’s Fine is a cavalcade of quirky characters, a promenade of “peculiar people.” And though the story is ostensibly about the title character, each individual in this book is a well-rounded person in their own right. Some of them I couldn’t help but love, others drove me crazy, but every last one was entertaining. Readers should get their popcorn now, because they won’t want to miss a second of the laughter, tenderness, dating drama, and self-discovery in this delightful little book. –Jeanine Bee, fiction editor at Wayfare.
Theric Jepson is a former president of the Association for Mormon Letters, the current editor of Irreantum, and the author of such things as Byuck and The Prophetess of Mars, and the co-editor of Served: A Missionary Comics Anthology and Monsters & Mormons. Find him online by looking for thmazing and clicking anything that comes up.
Sheldon Lawrence. Heaven Will Find You. Independently published.
A fatal crash. A hellish realm. And Heaven’s beckoning light.
Are there second chances in the afterlife?
Guided by angels, but tempted by lost spirits, a man discovers that death is no escape from the consequences of his choices. Can he find the courage to heal broken relationships and see himself in truth?
In an afterlife journey through worlds where past pain and lingering addictions frustrate the progress of departed spirits, Heaven Will Find You shows how God pursues wayward souls with unrelenting grace. Inspired by the research of hundreds of near-death experiences, this book will transform the way you view spiritual growth in this life and the next.
Sheldon Lawrence is a faculty member in the BYU-Idaho English Department, where he specializes in the history of spiritual autobiography. He is a former president of the Association for Mormon Letters.
Short Fiction
Lee Allred. “Four and Seven.” Irreantum, Summer 2023.
Lee Allred‘s stories have appeared in Asimov’s magazine, DC and Marvel Comics, and dozens of science fiction/fantasy/horror anthologies. His work has been nominated multiple times for various Association for Mormon Letters awards. Lee’s debut professional work, “For the Strength of the Hills,” was named a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. He graduated from BYU with a degree in Asian Studies.
Steven L. Peck. “Sister Carvahlo’s Excellent Relief Society Lesson.” In The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction.
Steven L. Peck is an ecology professor at Brigham Young University. He has published five literary novels: A Short Stay in Hell; The Scholar of Moab; Gilda Trillim, Shepherdess of Rats; King Leere, Goatherd of the La Sals; and Heike’s Void, as well as two short fiction collections and a poetry collection. For the body of his literary work, he received the 2021 Smith–Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters.
Joe Plicka. “Natural Causes.” In The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction.
Joe Plicka’s poems, stories, and essays can be found online in Brevity, Ekstasis Magazine, Braided Way, Booth, Hobart, and others. He was featured in the anthology Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets. He lives and teaches in Hawaii with his family, an auskydoodle, and a red-vented bulbul.
Lee Ann Setzer. “Compassed About.” Irreantum, Summer 2023.
Lee Ann Setzer holds a degree in speech-language pathology and works as project coordinator with a free early literacy project at Brigham Young University. She is the author of Gathered: A Novel of Ruth and the “Sariah McDuff” chapter book series.
Mathilda Zeller. “The Haunted.” Irreantum, Fall 2023.
Mathilda Zeller writes horror and fantasy. Her debut novel, The Revenge of Bridget Cleary, was a 2022 Whitney Awards Finalist. Her other work has appeared in Mermaids Monthly. “Kushtuka,” her short story in Never Whistle at Night, an anthology of indigenous horror released from Penguin Random House in September, was heralded by the Kirkus Reviews and “poignant and gripping.” She lives in Michigan with her husband and six children.
Special Award in Short Fiction
The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction. Andrew Hall and Robert Raleigh, editors. Signature Books.
The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi describes the journey to eternal life as going through a gate of ordinances and traveling a “straight and narrow path.” Twenty-three authors took that gospel roadmap passage as a prompt to write “a Mormon story.” They responded with a surprisingly wide range of realistic and fantastic tales. Many are human reactions to unexpected steps on the path: a lifetime of faith in a patriarchal blessing’s unfulfilled promise, a survivor of violence calling a divided community to repentance, a baptism gone very wrong, and spiritual gifts that extend far beyond the apostle Paul’s list. The characters stretch from wayward bishops and helpful home teachers to cyber-Seventies searching for lost sheep in the metaverse, with settings from the slums of Mumbai to a heaven that turns out to be more difficult than expected. Some characters reject the path’s restrictions and expectations, while others can second the reported words of J. Golden Kimball, “I may not always walk the straight and narrow, but I sure in hell try to cross it as often as I can.”