Articles on Utah literary arts, Utah authors, Utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
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 […]
Bob Rees is Director of Mormon Studies and Visiting Professor at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He was a Fulbright Professor of American Studies in the Baltics. His writing has appeared in local, national, and international publications.
Love and beauty are prominent themes in Aşık’s work, which he describes as “ordered by the soul.” This installment of READ Local First includes three poems in Turkish with the poet’s English translations.
An Unremarkable Girl is a mother/daughter memoir by Nan Seymour and Beatrice Washburn. The book tells the story of Beatrice, a transgender girl from Utah, who survives the perils of a misgendered adolescence… to become herself.
Jeri Parker once said that she built her summer cabin on family land in Idaho, but it never registered that she meant this literally: hammer in hand, from floorboards to ceiling joists. She even dug in the waterline. And in her captivating new memoir, My Seasons of Wilderness, the Salt […]
Welcome to this month’s edition of READ LOCAL First: Utah’s most comprehensive collection of accomplished poets and authors. This month we introduce you to deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day. Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist […]
During the time of Shakespeare, church leaders likened cats to witches. Rebecca Pyle: “With less cats came more rats, more fleas, more people infected too: black plague.”
In these times of isolation, we may find ourselves paying more attention to the particularities of things. Rather than witnessing life at the rate of a moving car, we find ourselves stationary, with the time to see — possibly anew — the things around us. In this, we […]
When I think of the dead, it means they’re thinking of me … Cheering or haunting, depending on your perspective, are these opening lines from Marianne Boruch’s “The No-Name Tapestries,” a work Natasha Sajé chose to read for us in honor of National Poetry Month. Sajé, a professor […]
… Mutter all you want: in this You are different from nobody, even in your feeling Alone at night when darkness brings itself down And all you find gazing out from where you are is light Blazing the house across the way, where you imagine Neighbors you haven’t […]
“Poetry is about trying to re-create an experience that, technically, can never happen again,” Trish Hopkinson said in our profile of the poet, blogger and literary arts advocate in April, 2019. “It’s specific to the poet or the character they’re writing through.” You can find Hopkinson’s work online […]
