Articles on Utah literary arts, utah authors, utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
In his introduction to Ellen Meloy’s Seasons: Desert Sketches, Doug Fabrizio, the host of KUER’s RadioWest, describes Meloy as “sassy and wise,” her writing as “funny and beautiful and almost always surprising.” Before Meloy’s untimely death in 2004, the Pulitzer Prize finalist and Whiting Award winner made regular […]
In James A. McLaughlin’s debut novel Bearskin, Rice Moore must choose to preserve his personal safety in anonymity or risk exposure by trying to catch the people responsible for the illegal killings of bear. The book is a plot-driven yet meaningful story of justice and redemption set in […]
According to rules Trish Hopkinson was responsible for creating, her own children aren’t able to join her poetry group. Both her son, 25, and daughter, 17, live in Salt Lake City, and Rock Canyon Poets is a Utah County-only group. “When I had ever done anything in the […]
This month we bring you Stephen Trimble—one of Utah’s most influential artists in Utah’s 15 (Vol. II). Among his other honors: The Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation; The National Cowboy Museum’s Western Heritage “Wrangler” Award; and a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College.
Trimble’s latest work includes an anthology of the best writing about Captiol Reef, The Capitol Reef Reader, to be published by the University of Utah Press in June 2019. His introduction to the Reader (his 25th book) grew from this piece, “The Blue Gate.”
After finishing Look Both Ways, I found myself recommending it to friends based on its ability to cause me to rethink imagination, history, and gender. It’s an imaginative book, self-imaginative. It’s a biography/memoir by Katharine Coles that centers on her grandmother, Miriam Wollaeger Link, and their respective journeys around the […]
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 Stefene Russell, a St. Louis-based poet, writer, editor and actor. She is a Salt Lake City native and graduate of the University of Utah where, she […]
The late Adrienne Rich once described her use of received poetic forms as “asbestos gloves” for handling difficult material. In Tacey M. Atsitty’s new collection Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press), sonnet, sestina, and villanelle surface amid prose poems, columnar incantations, a concrete poem with white […]
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 Shane Camoin, winner of the 60th annual Utah Original Writing Competition in the novel category. A second generation American, Camoin was born in L.A. and raised in […]
One snowy day in 2011, Stephen Trimble and his wife, Joanne Slotnik, arrived at a grove on the lower slopes of Mount Rainier with the ashes of his father. Trimble was born in Denver in 1950 to Don and Isabelle Trimble. Isabelle grew up in a small Montana town. Don was a geologist who worked his way through college and graduate school as a hard rock miner at the tail end of the Depression. He was responsible for Steve’s interest in photography and the natural world, Isabelle for his interest in people, and both for his respect for storytelling. “Every vacation was a new national park, and on our road trips Dad kept up a running commentary on Western history and landscape,” Trimble remembers. “His stories sounded more like parable. He retold them to communicate his values.” With reverential regard, Don Trimble, who hailed from Toppenish, Washington, referred to Mount Rainier as “The Mountain.”
Among the Utah literary set, “south of the border” can sometimes mean Utah County, but with its two major universities (Brigham Young—think former poet laureate Lance Larsen — and Utah Valley—think “sonosopher” and performance artist Alex Caldiero) as well as its robust independent lit organizations, you overlook it […]
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 poet Jennifer Tonge. Tonge resides in Salt Lake City and earned an MFA at the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and, […]
Come inside Tessa Fontaine’s The Electric Woman and you’ll travel through a hall of mirrors. You’ll watch a young woman incorporate the timeless dramas of grief in a sideshow tent, reflecting richer gestures of love and loss in the distant center ring. You’ll see our narrator undone […]
