Mormon Lit Starter Pack
At the third annual Wayfare Festival, held in July 2026, I had the pleasure of presenting alongside Rebbie Brassfield about Mormon representation and pop culture. Rebbie astutely decried most mainstream depictions of Mormons/Latter-day Saints as being caricatured, exploitative, or otherwise flat and reductive. Following Rebbie, I talked about some of the existing treasures of Mormon representation within the arts and letters of our own community, striving to highlight some books, films, and other media that have spoken powerfully to my own longings for rich artistic engagement with my own religious tradition.
What follows is a lightly annotated list of some works that have meant quite a bit to me, along with recommendations for specific works and places to keep your eye on if you want to explore more of the richness that Mormon arts and letters has in store, the treasures that you have been kept from simply because you knew not where to find them. This is an abbreviated and incomplete list! Please share your personal favorites and writers, artists, publishers that people should know about with me via email, at conorbhilton@gmail.com.
Some Personal Favs
Future Day Saints: the wildest, whackiest, most wonderful expression of Mormon imagination I have ever encountered. Page weaves Mormon theology, folklore, and scripture together with the aesthetics and narrative structures of 80s cartoons and action figures creating something totally new and thrilling.
Melissa Leilani Larson’s Pilot Program: The play imagines a near future where polygamy is reinstated as a sort of “pilot program”. Larson uses this premise to dramatize the real spiritual angst of feeling prompted, inspired, led by the Spirit to do something that you are deeply unsure about AND then traces the consequences of that choice in their thorough complexity. A deeply human, moving, at turns quite funny, work.
Brigham City (2001, dir. Richard Dutcher). The film is a tense, engaging thriller that follows a Bishop in a small town in Utah, where he is also the sheriff, as a series of murders disrupts the peace and tranquility of their community. The film’s emotional climax is one of the most powerful depictions I’ve ever seen of what ritual can be and do, rooted in an almost quotidian Mormon experience.
Regular Publications, Publishers, and Other Institutions
The 100 Significant Works of Mormon Literature list compiled by the Association for Mormon Letters (AML)
The LDSPMA (Latter-day Saints in Publishing, Media, and the Arts) Awards
Shorter, Creative Written Works
Dialogue (fiction/literary criticism and poetry)
Further Light (specializing in LDS-speculative fiction intersections)
Film and TV
Books
Greg Kofford (mostly religious non-fiction, but quite a few more literary works over the last few years)
Deseret Book
A Handful of Places to Begin
If you have a local ward/village idiot that you feel affection towards or would like to feel affection for, read the fantastic and hilarious novel in short stories The Tales of the Chelm First Ward, by James Goldberg, Nicole Wilkes Goldberg, and Mattathias Singh and its delightful cast of village idiots (also serialized for Wayfare).
If you like The Good Place but want a taste of eternity that gives you existential horror that will never leave you, read Steve Peck’s masterful novella, A Short Stay in Hell.
If you love section 129 of the Doctrine and Covenants and handshakes, check out “The Angel”, a short film by Barrett and Jess Burgin, available on Alter’s YouTube channel.
If you love Bruce Springsteen, listen to Pressure Machine by The Killers and experience the dulcet tones of Mormonism’s very own Springsteen.
If you enjoy grounded stories of religious folks trying to do their best despite their human frailties and family dramas, then Bound on Earth by Angela Hallstrom is the book for you
If you love women-centric stories that focus on a narrow strip of time, watch Jane & Emma, a fantastically acted drama starring critically acclaimed Danielle Deadwyler as Jane Manning James.
If you love pure, heartfelt testimonies of salt of the earth folks, read Darlene Young’s Homespun and Angel Feathers and everything else she’s written.