Articles on Utah literary arts, Utah authors, Utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
Sunni Brown Wilkinson says Joseph Stroud’s Of This World is one of the best poetry collections she has ever read. “Joseph Stroud is a remarkable but less well-known poet, mainly because he purposely shuns the spotlight,” Wilkinson says. “He lives part of the year in a cabin in […]
In their citation for the 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, the jurors of the 2018 prize wrote: In her brilliant new collection, “The Worrier,” Nancy Takacs has presented her readers with her most finely nuanced and psychologically sophisticated collection of poetry to date. Each piece is an […]
During this month of April, 2021, we return to Poets in Pajamas, an audio series celebrating National Poetry Month launched last year at the beginning of the pandemic. In this series, we ask Utah poets to read one of their own works, as well as a work by […]
Gray is known for crumpling paper into balls and throwing them behind him. The papers contain love notes or apologies. “I have fallen in love and apologized so often,” he says. We are proud to present four of his poems here.
“Out of characters struggling between religious convictions and emotional contradictions, Peterson manages to create an intense vision of Mormon life in the Mormon West.” —Page Stegner In the 19th century, Utah communities collaborated to send their most promising artists to Europe to be trained to the standards of […]
READ LOCAL First boasts Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. Today, we bring you five poems by Jared Pearce. Pearce obtained a Master’s degree in English from Brigham Young University, and a PhD (in American Poetry, 19th & 20th Century British Literature, and Critical Theory) from […]
There’s a small problem with Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal’s first book, and while it doesn’t adversely affect her sophisticated and engaging essays, it could discourage potential readers, which is clearly the opposite of what the publishers intended when they packaged the collection 20 years ago. First, the […]
READ LOCAL First boasts Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. Today, we feature Utah native Nathaniel Kennon Perkins. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado, and runs Trident Press. Perkins is the author of the novel Wallop (House of Vlad, 2020), the short story collection The Way Cities Feel […]
“I was planning to fail in my own way. I thought that was the point.” Among the benefits of public radio, which began half a century ago seeking, unsuccessfully, to liberate the airwaves from corporate control, were the many outlets it created for telling intimate stories to a […]
“The one constant in my life has been writing and publishing poetry,” says Steve Creson, a Seattle-native multimedia visual artist, writer, photographer, 16-mm filmmaker and occasional performance artist. In November 2020, Salt Lake City’s Elik Press published his Big Day / New and Selected Poems, with afterward by […]
READ LOCAL First boasts Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. For this inaugural month of 2021, we present five poems by Cindy King. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. Recently, King’s poetry was featured on […]
We’ve all got our Holiday media traditions, the books we reread, the movies we watch again. For some, it will be classics like A Christmas Carol or Home Alone; others may span out to less traditional fare, like say In Bruges (give it a try: if you can […]
