Articles on Utah literary arts, Utah authors, Utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
We are pleased to announce that Hikmet Sidney Loe’s innovative exploration of Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork, The Spiral Jetty Encyclo, has won the 15 Bytes Book Award for Art Book for 2018. David Habben’s steampunk coloring book and Mary Lee Fulkerson’s survey of women artists of the Great […]
Our relationship to the environment, notions of fatherhood, patriarchy and violence, and the way one can come to live by language appear in the poems of the finalists for this year’s 15 Bytes Book Award in poetry. Nancy Takacs’ “The Worrier,” a collection of interior dialogues coming to […]
Join 15 Bytes as we celebrate exemplary works in nonfiction that explore the trauma of birth, the travails of dementia and the solitude of the desert. The latter, Brooke Williams’ Open Midnight, receives the 15 Bytes Book Award this year (see our review here), with Jennifer Sinor’s Ordinary Trauma and […]
Gabriel Tallent’s debut novel My Absolute Darling may be difficult to read, but the judges of the 15 Bytes Book Awards for Fiction say we should. The story of 14-year-old Turtle Alveston’s abuse at the hands of her father can be harrowing, but redemption and grace are found in […]
READ LOCAL First represents Utah’s most comprehensive collection of celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and memoir. This week we bring you Todd Robert Petersen. The excerpt was originally from a short story, which took 2nd Place in the 2002 Utah Original Writing Competition. It is now […]
George Handley’s debut novel, “American Fork,” artfully weaves together themes of religion, environment, memory, belonging, nation, faith, and loss with haunting prose and wonderful insight. This novel stands apart as a beautiful, well-crafted story with fully fleshed-out characters. The individual pains and desires of these characters invite readers […]
For those who want to open life’s envelope rather than pass it on sealed, you will find no better companion than Jana Richman. Her new book of essays, Finding Stillness in a Noisy World, provides soul food for end times. Couldn’t we all use a dose of soul […]
READ LOCAL First represents Utah’s most comprehensive collection of celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and memoir. This week we bring you an excerpt from Tim Glenn’s 2017 Original Writing Competition First Place novel manuscript, Forever Desolation. Glenn is a historian and museum director living in Green River, Utah. He earned […]
The Underwater American Songbook, Rebecca Pyle’s 2018 digital chapbook, is structured around a captivating and engaging conceit: the collection, as Pyle explains in a foreword, is “a body of almost-lyrics about objects found underwater all around New York.” Each of the 10 poems, therefore, focuses on some sunken […]
READ LOCAL First represents Utah’s most comprehensive collection of celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and memoir. This week we bring you an excerpt from Aaron Cance’s novel-in-progress, The Past Day Will Shine. Cance, proprietor of Sandy-based indie bookstore The Printed Garden, earned a B.A. in English Literature from the University of […]
An attentive group of writers and mentors gathers around two long tables at the City Library downtown on a Thursday evening. This workshop is a collaboration between the Artes de Mexico en Utah (Mexican Art of Utah) and Salt Lake Community College’s Community Writing Center. Participants receive valuable […]
The epigraph to Lance Larsen’s new collection of prose poems is attributed to Paul of Tarsus: “Everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and suffer need.” Evoked, of course, is the ever-famous notion of negative capability […]
READ LOCAL First represents Utah’s most comprehensive collection of celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction, and memoir. This week we bring you Reiser Perkins, a Utah native who currently lives in Hawaii. She joins a distinguished group of writers, including Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal, former Utah Poet Laureate Katherine […]
READ LOCAL First represents Utah’s most comprehensive collection of celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and memoir. This week we bring you four previously unpublished poems by Clifton H. Jolley. A widely published poet and essayist, Jolley joins Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal and former Utah Poet Laureate Katharine Coles, […]
Alex Caldiero is an idiot. That’s not my assessment, but the judgment of the “frendly naybohood Sonosopher” himself: ALEX CALDIERO IS AN IDIOT wiser folk have said as much could I do anything less? I’ve also been called an asshole, which designation I’m not willing to accept. I’d […]
Steven L. Peck’s Gilda Trillim: Shepherdess of the Rats, winner of the Association for Mormon Letters’ 2018 award for novel, is at once whimsical and intensely meditative. It is cosmic in scope, yet profoundly intimate. In other words, it is full of paradox, the kind of paradox that leads the […]
“Many people might not have a specific book in mind when they come in, but they look through our shelves and when they find ‘it’, they just know.” Cindy Dumas describes one type of experience that customers might expect when they visit an independent bookstore. For Cindy, the […]
