Articles on Utah literary arts, Utah authors, Utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
In addition to chapbooks and incidental publications, poet and Utah Valley University professor Rob Carney has published three volumes of poetry. His fourth and latest book, however, comprises 42 innovative prose chronicles, each suitable for dipping into to nourish and kick-start the imagination. Because the form of expository […]
This book of essays opens with a memory of a song sung by the writer’s grandmother. “A voice that could make people cry,” the writer writes. Her grandmother was asked to sing a popular song as an emotional blessing or benediction at a celebration of the Boulder (Hoover) […]
“I’m not the artist my family members are, but I write.” What Ashley Marie Farmer almost certainly means is that she never felt the sense of vocation that led her grandmother, mom, and sister to paint, her brother to shape pottery, and her grandfather to build a house […]
“The best poems change all the while,” says Brenda Sieczkowski in this recording for our Poetry in Pajamas series. And she provides an example in the work of Kathryn Cowles, who, Sieczkowski says, has influenced her as a poet and a person. Cowles, a Provo native who studied […]
The youngest poet featured in this year’s installment of Poets in Pajamas, Chelsea Guevara discovered poetry in high school, but she had to wait until college before she heard the work of anyone not white or male. She discovered Rita Dove in her first semester at the University […]
Ken Sanders has been dealing knowledgeably in antiquarian books for half a century. (That’s why he has appeared on “Antiques Roadshow” on PBS for the past 17 years.) His downtown bookstore, at 268 S. 200 East, where Sanders has been located for 25 years, is treasured by aficionados […]
An arts community becomes especially vibrant when the people help managing it are part of it. Willy Palomo’s job at the Utah Humanities is running the Center for the Book, whose mission is to “foster a love of books as well as the exploration of contemporary issues through […]
Nancy Takacs’ fourth full-length poetry collection, Dearest Water (Mayapple Press 2022, 77pp.) continues the poet’s journey toward the spiritual center of wilderness, whether encountered out-of-doors (on a desert clifftop, say, or under a star-studded Western night sky) or glimpsed interiorly, after an argument with a beloved husband or […]
You probably know Matthew Ivan Bennett from his plays, whether for the stage — like his 2013 play about gender identity, Eric(a), or Mesa Verde, which explored the enduring scars of chronic illness — or for the radio (listen here for a recording of “Sleepy Hollow,” produced by […]
“I recently read Leila Chatti’s Deluge and was awed by her unflinching gaze at chronic illness,” says Kathryn Knight Sonntag, a writer, poet and landscape architect who lives in Salt Lake City. “In her twenties, Chatti, a young Arab-American woman, started bleeding and didn’t stop. Her physicians referred […]
Writers are sometimes drawn to other writers for what they have in common, like subject or theme. But they also can be drawn by the differences, in say craft or style. Something of both draws Ashley Farmer to Victoria Chang. “Victoria Chang is such a masterful, original poet […]
“irrecplaceable,” the community poem created as part of a vigil for Great Salt Lake, is overflowing. Intended to be at least 1,700 lines long, representing the square miles of water that would be needed to fully restore the lake, the poem exceeded 2200 lines as the vigil came […]
Performance Art is a twentieth-century name for a twentieth-century art form. It is also the title of David Kranes’ most recent collection of short stories, symbolized by the jumbled letters of the title that, on the cover, have pulled themselves up into a human figure and stepped into […]
Stephen Trimble’s 25th book is called The Mike File. The sound of the word mike trips certain thoughts: a sound-amplifying device; the beginning of the name Michaelangelo; that Mike is a nickname for a boy’s name common around the world. Memories: what-to-name-your-baby books tell new parents the name […]
Years ago, Lisa Roullard heard about a fugitive on the run who survived outdoors to elude capture. A year later, she wrote her first fugitive poem. “It never entered my mind that I’d write another, but then, suddenly, that was all I was writing….”
Do you remember that thing you used to do when we were kids? The thing with the turtles. When we lived in the old house by the creek, sometimes in summer it would rain so hard that it would flood, turning the backyard into our very own specimen pond. There were frogs of all sizes, earthworms thick as rope, salamanders slick as snot, and water bugs and crayfish everywhere. But they didn’t hold your interest. Not like the turtles did.
Artists of Utah is excited to announce that Alen Hamza’s Twice There Was a Country has won the 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry for 2021. Published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, the collection is a moving, lyrical portrait of a refugee stumbling his way towards […]
