Articles on Utah literary arts, utah authors, utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
READ LOCAL First represents Utah’s most comprehensive collection of celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and memoir. This month, we are honored to publish Chapter 1 of Look Both Ways, Katharine Coles’ biography/memoir (Turtle Point Press) and a finalist in the creative nonfiction category for the 2019 15 Bytes Book […]
Li-Young Lee, in a recent interview, describes a spiritual practice as “fundamentally orienting, compass-like, pointing the soul toward its primary source,” and that placing any other thing — politics, for instance — at the heart of the matter “must lead eventually to confusion … a form of dis-orientation.” […]
Inside the Animal, Shanan Ballam’s latest poetry collection, is subtitled “The Collected Red Riding Hood Poems” and encompasses some of her 2010 chapbook The Red Riding Hood Papers. Only some — a number of poems from the earlier work have been dropped as the poet has sharpened her focus, and new […]
if you touch the roof of my mouth with your finger tip you could win a prize
granted, it would just be another lie
like the time I told you my tongue would cure your headache
or that time you said I was kind
New York City-based author Tara Westover has been awarded the 15 Bytes Book Award for creative nonfiction for her memoir Educated, published by Random House. She received her bachelor’s from Brigham Young University. Our jurors wrote of the book: Born from torn metal, broken glass, and gasoline in […]
Educated is a marvel of a book, somehow thoroughly spirit-lifting despite being a fractured fairy tale of Beauty and the Beasts with dark purple bruises and broken bones and shattered hearts and minds and no real happily ever after for our Beauty; just life as we live it, […]
In what may be the keystone essay of his 2018 collection, The Bone Pile: Essays on Nature and Culture, Maximilian Werner asks a crucial question: “What is the purpose of listening?” The essay is entitled “Environmentalist,” and it is a musing on the unfortunate labeling that adheres to this […]
READ LOCAL First represents Utah’s most comprehensive collection of celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and memoir. This month we bring you Erica Soon Olsen. Olsen was born in Hollywood, California. A graduate of the University of Montana MFA program, she is the author of Recapture & Other Stories, […]
Artists of Utah is excited to announce the finalists for this year’s 15 Bytes Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. 2019 marks the 7th year for this annual award, given to recognize excellence in publishing for books written by a Utah author or with a Utah connection. We received […]
There’s an impending sense of madness in Janalyn Guo’s collection of short stories Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins. The quick movement between each story, and between imagery and action within each, feels at times like the manic switching of cable box channels or the incessant swiping […]
Salt Lake City poet Rob Carney has been awarded the 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry for his collection The Book of Sharks from Black Lawrence Press. Originally from Washington state, Carney is the author of four previous collections, including 88 Maps (Lost Horse Press 2015), which was named a finalist for […]
Klancy Clark de Nevers’ memoir, Lessons in Printing, explores the life of her father, Kearny Clark, a printer by trade who began to hear voices after the author went to college. Mental illness haunted her father until death but Clark de Nevers was at least ambivalent, or entirely detached at the time. In this beautiful work of atonement, we learn about a “loving but melancholy printer who inherited a small print shop based on old technology, operating in a town in decline.” Yes, we learn about how the author’s father lived and died. But as importantly, we learn about how Klancy de Nevers reconciles the past in order to continue living.
