15 Bytes is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2025 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry. Presented annually since 2013 by Artists of Utah, the award recognizes outstanding literary achievement by Utah poets or works with significant ties to the state published in the previous year. This year’s poetry finalists explore the shifting terrain of memory, ecology, spirituality, and communal imagination. From visionary elegy to speculative environmental lament to meditations on the sacred within everyday life, these books demonstrate the depth and range of Utah’s contemporary poetic landscape. We congratulate the finalists and celebrate their contributions to the arts in Utah and beyond. The winner will be announced in late-December.

The Book of Drought, published by Texas Review Press, is a haunting and visionary collection that speaks with urgent clarity to our ecological moment. Rob Carney imagines a landscape where water has vanished and the natural world survives only in memory, stories, and longing. Structured as a sequence of interwoven voices and episodic lyric narratives, the book creates a mosaic of perspectives—children, elders, wanderers, and witnesses—each contributing to a larger communal testament of loss and resilience.
What distinguishes this collection is its fusion of formal variety and mythic resonance: prose poems sit alongside lean, musical lyrics; fables unfold next to intimate confessions; recurring motifs echo across sections to create a cumulative emotional force. Carney’s poems are at once elegies for what has disappeared and acts of resistance against forgetting. They carry anger, tenderness, humor, and hope, often within a single breath. The language is clear and rhythmic, grounded in lived experience yet charged with speculative imagination, reminding us that environmental catastrophe is not a distant future but an unfolding present.

Rob Carney is an award-winning writer whose work blends environmental imagination, lyric storytelling, and mythic resonance. The author of multiple books across poetry and prose, he is known for weaving ecological awareness with deeply human narratives that explore resilience, connection, and the landscapes that shape us. His writing has appeared widely in national journals and has been recognized with numerous honors. Carney teaches at Utah Valley University.

Lindsey Webb’s Plat, published by Archway Editions, is a striking and original debut that approaches grief, memory, and place with unusual clarity and formal restraint. Throughout, Webb’s language is precise and calmly luminous. She builds her poems with an architect’s attention to shape and pattern, yet remains attuned to the unpredictability of lived experience.  Drawing on the Joseph Smith’s historical Plat of Zion as both metaphor and counterpoint, Webb sets the idea of an orderly, idealized city against the far less orderly realities of loss. The book’s prose-poem sequences move through houses, gardens, and shifting interior rooms, creating a landscape where personal history and cultural history continually overlap. At the center of Plat is the death of a childhood friend, a loss that Webb approaches indirectly, through images, fragments, and quiet narrative gestures. This subtle approach allows the book to honor grief without simplifying it; the poems acknowledge how memory rearranges itself and how the spaces we inhabit—literal and emotional—change in the aftermath of tragedy.

Lindsey Webb is a poet and editor based in Salt Lake City, where she also pursues a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. Before Plat, she published chapbooks including House and Perfumer’s Organ and has contributed to literary journals such as Chicago Review and Denver Quarterly. Plat is her first full-length book.

Lance Larsen’s sixth collection of poetry, published by the University of Tampa Press, affirms his place as one of Utah’s most perceptive and generous literary voices. On first impression, the poems in Making a Kingdom of It can seem deceptively cozy. He writes about ordinary suburban life, family relationships, household chores, pets, a walk in the woods, an occasional family vacation. But his underlying themes are big ones: Love and Death, God and Nature. Larsen is known as a Mormon poet, and religious practice informs his worldview. Practically every poem in this collection evokes the sacred, and it is what holds the collection together as a unified work. In the hands of a less accomplished writer, all of the God-talk might come across as sanctimonious or preachy, but Larsen is not limited by dogma. In the mystic tradition of Blake or Rumi, his poetic project is to seek a divine spark in everyone and everything around him. Among his other talents, Larsen is a great storyteller. Although these stories recount very specific personal experiences, they nonetheless read as universal because of way they hinge on the blessing of human care. The emotional punch comes from the challenges of accepting small annoyances, petty human failings and heart-breaking tragedy into the realm of the divine.

Lance Larsen is a poet and essayist based in Utah, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Brigham Young University. A former Utah Poet Laureate, he is the author of several poetry collections, including Genius Loci, Backyard Alchemy, and What the Body Knows. His work is known for its attentive, often lyrical engagement with daily life, spirituality, and memory. Larsen’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous national journals, and his honors include a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.