Artists of Utah and 15 Bytes are pleased to announce that Lance Larsen’s Making a Kingdom of It, has been selected as the winner of the 2025 15 Bytes Book Award in Poetry. Larsen is a poet and essayist based in Utah, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Brigham Young University.

As our jurors write,  “Lance Larsen’s sixth collection of poetry affirms his place as one of Utah’s most perceptive and generous literary voices. On first impression, Larsen’s poems 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 the biggies: 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.

In “I Caught an Elk Chewing,” you can practically hear Larsen channel Walt Whitman as he enters a self-conscious ecstasy over a momentary encounter with a wild animal. This kind of juxtaposition between sacred and mundane, though true to life, is also ridiculous, and Larsen knows it. He jokes about taking out the garbage after reading Song of Songs; he blesses the taxes that pay for his local swimming pool; he makes light of the idea that if everything is holy, so is all the stuff cluttering up the garage. The overall effect is like a Zen koan: Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood carry water.

Among his other talents, Larsen is a great storyteller. Many of these poems are written as fairly straightforward narrative without verbal pyrotechnics: they welcome the reader almost conversationally to hear tales of the aftermath of a car crash, or his in-laws who are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, or about persistent childhood memories reconsidered from the perspective of a grown-up. 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.”

We congratulate Lance Larsen on this outstanding accomplishment and celebrate Making a Kingdom of It for its enduring contribution to the literary, artistic, and cultural record of Utah and the region.

Listen to Larsen read selection from Making a Kingdom of It in this 15 Bytes interview.

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.