Association for Mormon Letters

The Association for Mormon Letters (AML) is a nonprofit founded in 1976 to "foster scholarly and creative work in Mormon letters and to promote fellowship among scholars and writers of Mormon literature." Other organization mottos have included the promotion of quality writing "by, for, and about Mormons." and promoting the "production and study of Mormon literature." The broadness of this definition of Mormon literature has led the AML to focus on a wide variety of work that has sometimes been neglected in the Mormon community.

The association holds an annual conference, usually held in Utah. Proceedings of the conferences were published until 2004. From 1995 to 2008 the AML sponsored AML-List, an e-mail list for the discussion of Mormon literature. List subscribers posted reviews of thousands of Mormon books, films, and other artistic works, which are archived in the association's review database. Besides the Annual, The AML also published the literary journal Irreantum from 1999 to 2013 and the literature blog Dawning of a Brighter Day since 2009.

Maureen Ursenbach Beecher wrote that a meeting held in the Church’s Historical Department on April 20, 1976 led to the organization of the association.Lavina Fielding Anderson described the founding of the organization in this way. "[The] Association for Mormon letters [was] founded with the specific purpose of fostering literary criticism. Its genesis lay in a meeting which Maureen Ursenbach Beecher called among a group of friends in the fall of 1976 to discuss the quality and availability of Mormon personal narratives . . . Eugene England and I were among the eight or ten people who came. Gene tossed out the question, “How could we go about organizing a group focused on the criticism of Mormon literature?” . . . We dutifully shifted, on the spot, from academics to activity. Maureen chaired [the] steering committee, formally organized the Association for Mormon letters, and persuaded us that the name should be “for Mormon letters,” not “of Mormon letters.” She also served as its first president, with Gene and I among her successors."

The inaugural symposium of the Association for Mormon Letters held on October 4, 1976, at the Hotel Utah. It featured papers by Richard Cracroft, Leonard J. Arrington, Bruce Jorgensen and Arthur Henry King. Steven Sondrup served as secretary and editor of the proceedings/annual until 1994. Lavinia Fielding Anderson took over as editor of the annual from 1996 to 2004.

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