Articles on Utah literary arts, Utah authors, Utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
“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 […]
Brigham Young University professor Patrick Madden has won the 15 Bytes Book Award for Creative Nonfiction for his collection of essays. Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Disparates confirms Madden’s reputation as an essayist of great humor, vitality and range. In one of the essays collected here, […]
Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner’s evocative, disturbing, dark novel, The Contortionists, has won this year’s 15 Bytes Book Award for fiction. The novel, which the author has described as a “literary crossover,” injects the tension of a suspense novel into the world of fully fleshed characters, deep context and […]
In Sweet Hearts, Melanie Rae Thon has written the most complex and challenging book … Complex because she has densely stitched together five generations of the lives of the families she created, but also woven them into more than a century of eventful and unsettling Western history. And challenging not only because this is a history of relentless exploitation, marked by misadventure, injustice, and cruelty, but also because she refuses to shield herself or her readers from the true horror of the continuing conflict between the Native Americans who were driven from their lands again and again, and the interlopers from the east who always found, and continue to find, reasons why they still want to take for themselves even the desolate places they forced those defeated communities to take on.
For the past couple of decades, I’ve enjoyed the works of Steve Creson across artistic formats and disciplines: screenings of his own and selected other short films in Belltown basement theaters, back when we met while living in Seattle (way back in years that started with a 1); […]
READ LOCAL First is the world’s most extensive library of Utah-related poets and writers. For this final iteration of the series in 2021, we introduce Steven Johnson, who writes as RG Halleck. Halleck lives in Utah with three others, two of whom share his DNA. Although he’s worked […]
There’s something appropriate, even impressive when a newly-minted author chooses to write about auspicious beginnings, as Darrell Spencer does in the stories collected in his first book, Our Secret’s Out. When those stories go on to recount how often such promising openings falter, how anticipation of a grand […]
“Can someone’s haircut tell you when their life fell apart?”
So begins Andrew Grace’s After College, this year’s Honorable Mention in Utah’s Original Writing Competition. Read on!
Ellen Meloy combines the contemplative life of meditation with being fully engaged in nature: I no longer want to know the names of things. I do not care if I am mute or it my tongue is useless for everything but the taste of salt. The verbal map […]
This is How They Burn You is short, concise, and dark in the manner of all great dystopian literature.
