NONFICTION
BLOSSOM AS THE CLIFFROSE: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild
edited by KARIN ANDERSON and
DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY
"Danielle Dubrasky and Karin Anderson are expert guides to this territory. Let them and this book bring you home."
—JOANNA BROOKS, author of The Book of Mormon Girl
Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild features original poems and prose by talented writers who are faithful, non-faithful, believers, heretics, converts and de-converts, dragged in or forced out of the Mormon faith. This dynamic collection demonstrates the breadth, complexity, and diversity of a Latter-day Saint legacy of commitment to natural place and challenges us to examine the myriad ways our own deeply rooted heritage shapes our personal relationship with landscape.
June 2021 | Nonfiction | ISBN: 978-1-948814-42-3 | 250 pp | $21.95
CONTRIBUTORS
Karin Anderson | Tacey M. Atsitty | Matthew James Babcock | Kumen Baldwin Louis Phyllis Barber | Danielle Beazer Dubrasky | John Bennion | Lisa Bickmore
Christopher Nelson Bowcutt | Scott Cameron | Tyler Chadwick | Jennifer Champoux
Star Coulbrooke | Kathryn Cowles | Reb Cuevas | Stacie Shannon Denetsosie-Mitchell
Amelia England | Megan Fairbanks | Jack Garcia | George B. Handley | Jack Harrell
Heather Holland | Theric Jepson | Tamara Johnson | Melody Newey Johnson
Kimberly Johnson | Farina King | Lance Larsen | Kumen Louis | Lyn McCarter
Michael McLane | Lee Ann Mortensen | Thomas W. Murphy | Sarah Newcomb
Twila Newey | Julie J. Nichols | David G. Pace | Michael William Palmer | Dayna Patterson
Matthew Pockrus | Lisa Madsen Rubilar | Kathryn Knight Sonntag | Laura Stott
Nano Taggart | Robert Terashima | Laura Walker | Ronda Walker Weaver
Darlene Young | Natalie Young
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
KARIN ANDERSON is the award-winning author of Things I Didn’t Do, What Falls Away, and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. She is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, and self-described heretic, as well as the co-editor of the acclaimed anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild. A former professor of English at Utah Valley University, Anderson holds degrees from Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah. She hails from the Great Basin and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values and is an associate professor of creative writing at Southern Utah University. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, South Dakota Review, Ninth Letter, Main Street Rag, Pilgrimage, saltfront, Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Under a Warm Green Linden, and Terrain.org. Her chapbook, Ruin and Light, won the 2014 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems were also published in the limited-edition art book (In)visible Shores by the Red Butte Press of the University of Utah. 
PRAISE FOR BLOSSOM AS THE CLIFFROSE
“Meditative and energizing, fierce and loving, balanced and rhythmic. An invitation to welcome faith and nature, and to embrace the tensions and beauty that spring from every crack and cranny along the way.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
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“When I ask my Mormon-Jewish daughter when she feels most Mormon, she tells me, ‘When I am outside, in the canyons, in the mountains, in the West.’ The beloved community of writers assembled here articulates a thousand reasons why so many of us feel this way. These are rich and complicated feelings—not just the sublimity of Wordsworth’s environmental imagination, but also feelings of betrayal, reverence, disappointment, pleasure, misunderstanding, and loss appropriate to a place storied with theft and massacre, failed dams and inland seas, uranium and abandoned poisons, dried seeps and sacred groves, salt and gulls, sego lilies, and hordes of crickets. Danielle Dubrasky and Karin Anderson are expert guides to this territory. Let them and this book bring you home.”
—JOANNA BROOKS, author of The Book of Mormon Girl and co-editor of Mormon Feminisms and Decolonizing Mormonism
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“No idea looms larger in the Mormon mind than wilderness—a pure, unspoiled place that gives people refuge and prepares them for revelation. Blossom as the Cliffrose gathers some of Mormonism’s most creative voices to testify to the power of wilderness spaces—in the land, in our faith, and in our lives. The essays and poems in this volume come from the heart of the wilderness and are themselves both refuge and revelation.”
—MICHAEL AUSTIN, author of Reading the World and Buried Treasures
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Cassandra Soelberg, pregnant at seventeen, was cast out by Mormon patriarchs of her community. Returning to her rural Utah hometown after forty years to care for her senile mother, she meets a young man with an uncanny resemblance to the father of her never-known child. Drawn back into traumatic scenes of young adulthood, she must reconcile with her past in the fiercely beautiful landscapes that shaped her.
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