The Association for Mormon Letters will present three special achievement awards at the 2024 AML Conference, which will be held online on July 18-20. Shannon Hale, Chris Crowe, and Carol Lynch Williams are all novelists who have worked primarily in children’s and youth fiction, fitting with the conference’s theme, “The Youth of Zion: Young Adult, Middle Grade, and Children’s Literature”. Full award citations will be released in the coming weeks.
Shannon Hale will be presented with the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. She will do an in-person presentation about youth literature and be available for signing books at Writ & Vision bookstore and art gallery in Provo, Utah, on Saturday, July 20, 2:30 – 3:30 PM. It will be the only in-person event of the conference. Also, during the 
conference we will broadcast an interview with Shannon by Katie Irion and Emma Tueller Stone.
Shannon Hale is the author of many books for children and youth, including the Newbery Honor book Princess Academy, as well as novels for adults, including Austenland, which was adapted into a film in 2013. She has received AML Awards for the novels Enna Burning and Princess Academy, and for the graphic novels Real Friends and Friends Forever.
Chris Crowe and Carol Lynch Williams will be presented with AML Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Chris Crowe is an author of many novels and biographies for youths, a literature scholar, and a professor of English at Brigham Young University, where he has trained many authors and scholars of juvenile literature. He has won AML Young Adult Novel awards for Mississippi Trial, 1955 (2002), about the Emmett Till case and Death Coming Up the Hill (2014, it also won a Whitney Award), about the Vietnam War. An interview with Chris Crowe, conducted by Ann Dee Ellis, will be broadcast on Saturday, July 20, 3:30 – 4:25 PM.
Carol Lynch Williams is an educator and a prolific author of novels for children and young adults. She is a professor of creative writing at Brigham Young University, and is a co-founder and director of annual Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference, a 5-day conference held in Utah since 1999. She has won AML Awards for her novels My Angelica (2001) and The Chosen One (2009, it also won a Whitney Award), as well as an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Whitney Awards. An interview with Carol Lynch Williams will be broadcast on Saturday, July 20, 4:30-5:25 PM.