front cover of If Mother Braids a Waterfall
If Mother Braids a Waterfall
Dayna Patterson
Signature Books, 2020

Dayna Patterson has produced a book obsessed with motherhood and daughterhood, ancestry, and transition—of home, family, faith, and the narratives woven to uphold the Self. In her debut collection of poetry and lyric essay, Patterson grapples with a patriarchal and polygamous heritage. After learning about her mother’s bisexuality, Patterson befriends doubt while simultaneously feeling the urge to unearth a feminist theology, one that envisions God the Mother taking pride in her place at the banquet table.

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front cover of Immortal for Quite Some Time
Immortal for Quite Some Time
Scott Abbott
University of Utah Press, 2016

Winner of the Utah Arts Council's Original Writing Competition Book Manuscript Prize in Creative Nonfiction
Winner of the 15 Bytes Book Award for Creative Nonfiction

“This is not a memoir. Rather, this is a fraternal meditation on the question: ‘Are we friends, my brother?’ The story is uncertain, the characters are in flux, the voices are plural, the photographs are as troubled as the prose. This is not a memoir.” 
     Thus Scott Abbott introduces the reader to his exploration of the life of his brother John, a man who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of forty. Writing about his brother, he finds he is writing about himself and about the warm-hearted, educated, and homophobic LDS family that forged the core of his identity.
     Images and quotations are interwoven with the reflections, as is a critical female voice that questions his assertions and ridicules his rhetoric. The book moves from the starkness of a morgue’s autopsy through familial disintegration and adult defiance to a culminating fraternal conversation. This exquisitely written work will challenge notions of resolution and wholeness.

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front cover of In a Rugged Land
In a Rugged Land
Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, 1953–1954
James Swensen
University of Utah Press, 2018
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front cover of Irish Mormons
Irish Mormons
Reconciling Identity in Global Mormonism
Hazel O'Brien
University of Illinois Press, 2023
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the international religions that have arrived from abroad to find adherents in Ireland. Drawing on fieldwork in two LDS communities, Hazel O’Brien explores how these adherents experience the Church in Ireland against the backdrop of the country’s increasingly complex religious identity. Irish Latter-day Saints live on the margins of the nation’s religious life and the worldwide LDS movement. Nonetheless, they create a sense of belonging for themselves by drawing on collective memories of both their Irishness and their faith. As O’Brien shows, Irish Latter-day Saints work to shift the understanding of Ireland’s religious landscape away from a predominant focus on Roman Catholicism. They also challenge Utah-based constructions of Mormonism in order to ensure their place in the Church’s powerful religious and cultural lineage.

Examining the Latter-day Saint experience against one nation’s rapid social and religious changes, Irish Mormons blends participant observation and interviews with analysis to offer a rare view of the Latter-day Saints in contemporary Ireland.

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