Artists of Utah is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2024 15 Bytes Book Award in Creative Nonfiction is Morgan Sjogren’s Path of Light: A Walk Through Colliding Legacies of Glen Canyon (Torrey House Press, 2023). Since 2013, the 15 Bytes Book Awards—presented each year by Artists of Utah, publisher of 15 Bytes—have honored excellence in publishing in the categories of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and art book. This year, we are proud to recognize Path of Light for its formal ambition and for its fierce, eloquent inquiry into the American West.

“Morgan Sjogren’s Path of Light is a work of creative nonfiction that refuses to flatten the West into postcard or playground,” the jurors write. “Sjogren insists on the historical density of this place, the abiding presence of the land, and the conflicting legacies layered into every canyon wall. Sjogren’s walk is both literal and archival—her sentences move through the contemporary desert while in dialogue with journals, maps, and reports from the 1920s Bernheimer expeditions—and the book is precise in its attention to how the “explorer” narrative was manufactured, and whom it served.

This book models a creative nonfiction practice in which the narrator is not an owner but a student of place. Sjogren situates herself as witness, translator, and guest: her approach resists mastery and instead foregrounds relationality, contingency, listening. Her prose is lush and rigorous at once; we feel the sun on the slickrock, we see the petroglyphs, but we also feel the documentarian’s humility, the way she places Indigenous histories and presences at the center of the frame rather than in peripheral scenery. The book’s achievement is not to supply a new myth of the desert, but to dismantle one, and to reveal the larger truth—that for Glen Canyon, for Bears Ears, for the broader Colorado Plateau, every trail is a palimpsest of previous stories, and those stories are not interchangeable and not innocent.”

For its beauty, its intellectual clarity, its ethical rigor, and its willingness to hold the past and the present in the same aperture, Artists of Utah is honored to name Path of Light our 2024 15 Bytes Book Award Winner in Creative Nonfiction.

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.