Articles on Utah literary arts, Utah authors, Utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
Rob Carney’s Book of Sharks (winner of the 2019 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry) was a ferocious tour-de-force. The poems in Facts + Figures are more gentle, though not entirely toothless. Carney, whose poetry is grounded in the re-enchantment of the world, begins the collection with a sequence titled “Thirteen Facts,” […]
Artists of Utah is excited to announce the finalists for this year’s 15 Bytes Book Award for Fiction. For the past eigth years Artists of Utah has celebrated excellence in published works by a Utah author or with a Utah connection with the 15 Bytes Book Awards. The […]
Petersen’s dialogue is fast; his descriptions are succinct. Chapter 1 of The Prayer of St. Francis adds another worthy addition to the library of READ LOCAL First.
Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World collects fifteen personal essays written by Jennifer Sinor over about that many years. The collection opens with “Headwaters,” an account linking a family death and a coincidental birth, one life ending and another continuing in its place. By comparison […]
There are few exits off I-15 into Springville: one leads you directly into “Art City,” where a stellar Spanish Colonial Revival-style museum houses thousands of treasures by Utah, American, and Russian creators; another, author Michael William Palmer’s exit, features numerous dead-end jobs and an assortment of dead people. […]
The Utah Division of Arts & Museums and the SLCC Community Writing Center have chosen 18 writers in seven categories as the winners of the 61st annual Utah Original Writing Competition. The winners were selected from a total of 291 entries from Utah-based writers. Category A: Novel, judged […]
It’s early summer and the water is high. My mother grasps the handles of two wooden oars and feels the Colorado River surge through her arms. A gray ring of raft surrounds her, sixteen feet from bow to stern, and beyond it, the mud-red river roils. Near the […]
This month we bring you selections by five local authors. Voices from the River includes pieces by Karen M. Bayard, Sean Patrick McPeak, Suzy Eskenazi, Emilia Wint, and Gail Weinflash.
Anyone who’s seen the play or film Amadeus will remember the scene where Mozart has debuted his new opera for Emperor Joseph and his palace gang. The emperor tells Mozart (I’m paraphrasing) that it was a good effort, and showed promise and talent, but that it had — […]
I am a different kind of lover of truth now Since his death in 2011, Edwin Parker ‘Cy’ Twombly, Jr. has emerged as a key figure of 20th-century art, even as many of his contemporaries and followers have fallen behind. Ironic confirmation of his importance comes from […]
Michael Lavers, After Earth, University of Tampa Press If much of contemporary poetry is like a museum full of Rothko paintings, then Michael Lavers is walking in and hanging up a Renaissance painting. If it’s like an aviary, then Lavers’ book After Earth is more like a woodpecker across the […]
The twenty-first century’s first pandemic is in full swing when I video conference with Nan Seymour. We were scheduled to meet in person but, after possible exposure to Covid-19, I am under self-quarantine while awaiting test results. In 2015, Seymour founded River Writing — a Salt Lake City-based collective […]
