Articles on Utah literary arts, Utah authors, Utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
“Out of characters struggling between religious convictions and emotional contradictions, Peterson manages to create an intense vision of Mormon life in the Mormon West.” —Page Stegner In the 19th century, Utah communities collaborated to send their most promising artists to Europe to be trained to the standards of […]
READ LOCAL First boasts Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. Today, we bring you five poems by Jared Pearce. Pearce obtained a Master’s degree in English from Brigham Young University, and a PhD (in American Poetry, 19th & 20th Century British Literature, and Critical Theory) from […]
There’s a small problem with Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal’s first book, and while it doesn’t adversely affect her sophisticated and engaging essays, it could discourage potential readers, which is clearly the opposite of what the publishers intended when they packaged the collection 20 years ago. First, the […]
READ LOCAL First boasts Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. Today, we feature Utah native Nathaniel Kennon Perkins. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado, and runs Trident Press. Perkins is the author of the novel Wallop (House of Vlad, 2020), the short story collection The Way Cities Feel […]
“I was planning to fail in my own way. I thought that was the point.” Among the benefits of public radio, which began half a century ago seeking, unsuccessfully, to liberate the airwaves from corporate control, were the many outlets it created for telling intimate stories to a […]
“The one constant in my life has been writing and publishing poetry,” says Steve Creson, a Seattle-native multimedia visual artist, writer, photographer, 16-mm filmmaker and occasional performance artist. In November 2020, Salt Lake City’s Elik Press published his Big Day / New and Selected Poems, with afterward by […]
READ LOCAL First boasts Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. For this inaugural month of 2021, we present five poems by Cindy King. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. Recently, King’s poetry was featured on […]
We’ve all got our Holiday media traditions, the books we reread, the movies we watch again. For some, it will be classics like A Christmas Carol or Home Alone; others may span out to less traditional fare, like say In Bruges (give it a try: if you can […]
READ LOCAL First: This is Utah’s most comprehensive collection of poets and authors. For the month of December, 2020, we present creative nonfiction by Utah Original Writing Competition winner Iris Moulton. The excerpt here is from Moulton’s creative nonfiction book-length manuscript, Non. Tessa Fontaine judged her winning entry. Moulton lives […]
Rob Carney’s Book of Sharks (winner of the 2019 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry) was a ferocious tour-de-force. The poems in Facts + Figures are more gentle, though not entirely toothless. Carney, whose poetry is grounded in the re-enchantment of the world, begins the collection with a sequence titled “Thirteen Facts,” […]
Artists of Utah is excited to announce the finalists for this year’s 15 Bytes Book Award for Fiction. For the past eigth years Artists of Utah has celebrated excellence in published works by a Utah author or with a Utah connection with the 15 Bytes Book Awards. The […]
Petersen’s dialogue is fast; his descriptions are succinct. Chapter 1 of The Prayer of St. Francis adds another worthy addition to the library of READ LOCAL First.
Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World collects fifteen personal essays written by Jennifer Sinor over about that many years. The collection opens with “Headwaters,” an account linking a family death and a coincidental birth, one life ending and another continuing in its place. By comparison […]
There are few exits off I-15 into Springville: one leads you directly into “Art City,” where a stellar Spanish Colonial Revival-style museum houses thousands of treasures by Utah, American, and Russian creators; another, author Michael William Palmer’s exit, features numerous dead-end jobs and an assortment of dead people. […]
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 — […]
