1988  AML Award: Poetry

Presented to:
Clinton F. Larson

For:
Selected Poems of Clinton F. Larson

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The poetry of Clinton Larson has been honored before by The Association for Mormon Letters as the best Mormon poetry in a given year, and has been discussed in a Symposium session. This year, prompted by the publication of his Selected Poems, edited by David Evans, we honor Clinton Larson for forty years of outstanding contributions to Mormon Letters. He has been praised as one of America's finest Western poets, called the first real Mormon poet, the father of modern Mormon writers that emerged in the 1960s and forged new combinations of honesty and faith, formal skill and concern for the truth of Mormon experience. We honor him for his role as a pioneer, both in conceiving and helping to found the first modern journal of Mormon letter, Brigham Young University Studies, and in setting new standards for Mormon writers in the quality and content of his poetry. We honor him for the splendid lyrics that have appeared regularly throughout his career and are gathered in Selected Poems. And we honor him that in his fifth decade as a publishing poet he continues to produce good work and to nurture and challenge us all.

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