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'Before Us Like A Land Of Dreams' With Karin Anderson on Thursday's Access Utah

Now Playing Utah

Writer Karin Anderson will launch her latest novel Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. Join Anderson for reading and conversation at The King's English.

Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened Western mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain fami

ly delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic- and diminishing- American places.

Karin Anderson is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University where she focuses on creative writing, lit theory, wilderness and environmental writing, LGBTQ lit, contemporary narrative genres, and honor legacies. Her work has appeared in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Quarter After Eight, Western Humanities Review, Sunstone, Saranac Review, American Literary Review, and Fiddleback. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a finalist in Quarter After Eight, and awarded "Best Short Story by a Utah Author." Karin holds degrees from Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah; she hails from the Great Basin.