We at Signature Books are profoundly saddened to learn of the June 29 passing of our dear friend, Carol Lynn Pearson.
Some people leave behind books.
Carol Lynn Pearson leaves behind many, but more than that, she leaves seeds that invite us to love more generously, live more courageously, and make room for everyone.
She spent her life reminding the world that compassion is an act of courage. Through her poetry, books, plays, essays, and diaries, she gave a voice to those who felt unseen.
Over the past two years, it has been one of the great privileges of our lives to know and work with Carol Lynn in achieving her last literary goal: publishing her diaries, which chronicled her life from the age of 17 to 85. As we visited with her just days ago, she spoke of her pleasure that the first two volumes of her Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson are now available to the world, and was thrilled to know that the third and fourth volumes will be published this fall. Even as she faced the end of her journey, her attention remained on sharing her life story in hopes of encouraging others, deepening conversations, and spreading the love she believed could change hearts.
She shared a message with all of us in the final entry of her fourth and final diary:
“For two full years I have focused intently on reliving and sharing my (as of today) eighty-five year journey. If you are reading this entry, you have traveled the long road with me, observing one woman navigating her life as a Latter-day Saint, as a feminist, as an activist for LGBT causes, as a mother, a friend, a seeker of God, a discoverer of Godliness, a woman of laughter, a woman of grief, a celebrator of light.
I thank you for your interest in this one singular life. And now—
To Those Who Have Loved Me
When I am gone
Let me lie in state
in your heart
for a day or two
or more.
then plant me
deep in the soil
of your best work
and let me help
towards harvest.”
Thank you, Carol Lynn, for your friendship, your trust, your courage, and your words. We'll keep you in our hearts for a day or two, or more. And then, like countless others, we'll plant you deep in the soil of our best work, and let you help toward harvest.
The Signature Books team
Some Hard Stars
poems by David Thacker
Some Hard Stars knits together past and present in pursuit of a deeper understanding of love, rebirth, and sustaining joy. Through poems full of care and tenderness for family, neighbors, and friends, Thacker demonstrates how “love requires / a willing mind,” especially when confronting the difficulties of mortality with honesty. These poems sing and think out loud, through traditional forms and meters as well as through music invented for the needs at hand. They are intense and exacting in their questions, careful and complex in their laments, and delicate with sacred moments of change.
paperback $16.95 | ebook $15.99
These Saints Are Stones
poems by Millie Tullis
In Millie Tullis’s new poetry collection, These Saints Are Stones, a faithless daughter is haunted by her third-great-grandmother, Martha, a woman who married her stepfather at sixteen and became a sister-wife to her own mother. Tullis cannot stop uncovering details about Martha, who left no written history behind, and her silence permeates this collection, which is rife with gaps and fragments, scraps of memory that blend with dreams. Sparse and spare, these poems echo the red desert landscape where the speaker’s ancestors lived and died, where she hunts for graves among the rocks and confronts a past she can never fully know. After all, like a sampling of lace, the cloth of women’s history is more hole than thread.
paperback $16.95 | ebook $15.99
Tracy Y. Cannon: Tabernacle Organist
and Pioneering Musician, 1879–1961
Shelby Fisher
Tracy Y. Cannon guided the musical voice of Mormonism from its provincial roots at the turn of the twentieth century into a state of maturity by the end of his career in 1960. Cannon served as Salt Lake Tabernacle organist from 1905 until 1930, accompanying some of the first radio broadcasts of Music and the Spoken Word. Under his leadership, the McCune School of Music and Art became a cultural hub, offering accredited music degrees as well as community enrichment activities, influencing Utah’s next generation of music educators, composers, leaders, and policymakers. But perhaps his most lasting legacy was his work with the General Music Committee of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, through which he oversaw the creation of two hymnals, many anthem books, organ anthologies, method books, and an expansive organist and chorister education program.
Cannon’s musical tastes—dignified, refined, reverent, and heavily influenced by Northern European tradition—became the norm for Latter-day Saint congregations for generations. Through his multifaceted career, this brief biography explores the evolution of Latter-day Saint hymnody, “art music,” cultural taste, and music education during the first half of the twentieth century.
paperback $16.95 | ebook $15.99
We’re Thankful for the Moisture: A Gay Guy’s Guide to Mormon Faith, Family, and Fruit Preservation
Eli McCann
We’re Thankful for the Moisture contains personal essays by award-winning humor columnist Eli McCann for The Salt Lake Tribune, along with corresponding cartoons by the Tribune’s Pat Bagley. McCann explores cultural Mormonism and his experiences growing up in Utah as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1990s, coming out as gay in adulthood, leaving his faith, and navigating life in Salt Lake City with his husband and their young child. Known for his observational humor, nostalgia, and compassion for those in his community who span the religious spectrum, McCann weaves together the silliness that often comes out of communal traditions with the humanity of those who hold those traditions dear. “I still think there’s no better sound than the background noise of neighbors being neighbors,” he writes, ”the simple hum of a people gathered.” While there is much humor to be found in baffling cultural entreaties, like McCann’s grandmother sincerely claiming that nineteenth-century Mormon pioneers wouldn’t trade places with those who live in 2025, or parents justifying a curfew time by insisting “the Holy Ghost goes to bed at midnight,” there is also beauty in what prompts a person to believe such things. McCann’s writings seek to prove just that.
Published in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.
paperback $19.95 | ebook $17.99 | audiobook $14.95
Building a Global Zion: The Life and Vision of David O. McKay
Brian Q. Cannon
Called as an apostle in 1906, David O. McKay devoted the remaining sixty-four years of his life to serving in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including nineteen as church president. That lengthy tenure, combined with his warmth, extensive personal ministry, broadmindedness, deep spirituality, and unprecedented global travel made him one of the church’s most beloved and influential leaders of all time. When he died in 1970, roughly 60 percent of the church’s membership had known no other church president. Memories of McKay’s teachings and ministry remain a taproot for the spiritual convictions and values of many Latter-day Saints.
Brian Q. Cannon’s biography offers a fresh perspective on important features of McKay’s life, showing how his mission to Scotland, round-the-world tour as an apostle, and service as president of the European Mission shaped his global vision and priorities. Building a Global Zion illuminates previously underappreciated facets of McKay’s reach, including his crusades against alcohol consumption and political corruption, his long-term administration of missionary work, his spiritual impressions, his personnel decisions, and his mediation of interpersonal impasses in administrative settings. Cannon carefully reconstructs facets of McKay’s vast ministry to individuals, highlights distinctive themes of his teachings, and explores challenges that confronted McKay’s associates as his health and acuity waned.
paperback $26.95 | ebook $22.99
The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson—Mormon Author,
Feminist, and Activist, Volume 1: 1956–1990
Carol Lynn Pearson
“I feel somehow that of all the writing I am doing, my diary is the most important.” So wrote the beloved and bestselling author, poet, and playwright Carol Lynn Pearson in her 1979 diary. Several years before, she recorded, “I feel the imperative of history. . . . Add that to my being a household word to many and I cannot escape the feeling that in many years there might be a number of people interested in these pages.” Today, that time has come.
Unbeknownst to almost everyone but herself, Pearson kept a near-daily diary since she was a teenager, recording her remarkable story in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mormon America. In this first of a four-volume series, Pearson chronicles her love for her church but also her troubling experiences and concerns with its patriarchy, historic doctrine of polygamy, omission of a feminine divine, and homophobia. Readers will rejoice with her as her first book of poetry, Beginnings, sells an astonishing 150,000+ copies and puts her on the map in the 1960s, empathize with her as she watches her church help kill the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and mourn with her as her mixed-orientation marriage ends and she cares for her former husband in her home as he dies of AIDS in the 1980s. The sensitive-girl-turned-strong-woman who emerges in these diaries insists that we move from patriarchy into partnership, change our destructive policies towards Queer people, and invite God the Mother back into our heavenly family.
paperback $29.95 | ebook $22.99
Educating Zion: The Diaries of BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, 1952–1971
Edited by Gary James Bergera
During the twenty years he served as president of LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University (1951–71), Ernest L. Wilkinson transformed the school into a showplace of the church’s educational values. "More than any other single cause," his successor, Dallin H. Oaks, observed, “[Wilkinson's] remarkable and relentless leadership . . . is the key to the present stature of Brigham Young University.” Under Wilkinson, the student body grew more than four-fold to 25,000, the faculty tripled, colleges and departments more than doubled, library holdings increased nearly 500 percent, the number of buildings jumped twenty-fold, and as perhaps the most telling manifestation of Wilkinson's influence, annual LDS Church subsidies rose fifteen-fold to $22 million. His single-minded drive to mold BYU into the kind of institution he hoped would command the admiration of American academia permanently set the direction for Latter-day Saint higher education. As he presided over this academic landscape, Wilkinson produced about 5,000 pages of typed, single-spaced diaries–—a literary creation that ranks among the most important diaries in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Wilkinson also had access to the highest echelon of the church, writing of numerous meetings of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Educating Zion assembles in one volume an annotated abridgement of those diary entries having the greatest interest to modern readers. The diaries are both a remarkable achievement and a phenomenal historical record whose importance cannot be overstated.
paperback $39.95 | ebook $22.99
Game Changers: AJ Dybantsa, BYU,
and the Struggle for the Soul of Basketball
Matthew Bowman and Wayne LeCheminant
Thurl Bailey, audiobook narrator
In one of the most unlikely coups in college basketball history, a religious school in Utah signed basketball phenomenon AJ Dybantsa. He will play for Brigham Young University—hardly the sort of basketball powerhouse that typically attracts exceptional and non-Mormon players like him.
Game Changers explores how BYU managed this stunning feat. A year before signing Dybantsa, the university lured coaching star Kevin Young from the NBA to run its basketball program. In the decade before, court rulings and institutional reform put money at the forefront of college sports in ways the American public had never seen. And for generations before that, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built a theological structure and institutional commitment to basketball that put the sport front and center at BYU.
Game Changers places Dybantsa in the context of this history and culture and explores the tensions in the sport. For Latter-day Saints and many other basketball fans, the sport is about personal discipline, character, and a commitment to success. But more and more, universities, the NCAA, and the professional leagues place money above everything else. These dual impulses have pulled the sport in general, and the church-owned BYU in particular, in opposite directions. The book reveals why Dybantsa decided to attend BYU and what he means to the sports world—in Provo, in the United States, and around the globe—as his career unfolds.
hardback $39.95 | paperback $29.95 | ebook $22.99 | audiobook $19.95
My Jesus: Art Cards
Written and curated by Lainie Pyper and McArthur Krishna
This set of twenty art cards beautifully illustrates how children around the world see Jesus. Complete with a corresponding Bible verse for each image, the cards invite children and adults alike to explore the universal love of Jesus—no matter who we are or where we come from.
Perfect for: • Use at church • Family time • Display at home
Featuring artwork by: Gifty Annan-Mensah, Rachel Callan, Esther Candari, Hanna Choi, Jenna Conlin, Natalie Cosby, Rose Datoc Dall, Tasha Diaz, Michelle Franzoni, Robert Fuerer, Amy Jones, Kat Mitchell, Paige Payne, Kathy Peterson, Alice Pritchett, J. Kirk Richards, Chrisanne Serafin, Eternity Stovall, Kwani Wander, and Julie Yuen.
box set $16.95
Creature: The Life and Loves of May Swenson
Stephen Carter
In the summer of 1936, twenty-three-year-old May Swenson boarded a bus heading east out of her Mormon hometown of Logan, Utah. Her destination was New York City, where she had a single goal: become a poet. Creature tells the story of how this small-town woman fought to achieve her dreams in the Depression-era big city, keeping a roof over her head and honing her craft as she pursued romantic relationships with both men and women. After decades of struggle, Swenson became one of mid-century America’s most beloved and prolific poets.
What is it that makes her poetry so extraordinary? How did she see and reveal the world? How did she teach the art of poetry? And how does her work interact with her Mormon roots? Readers will learn the answers to these questions and more in this artfully written biography.
FALL 2026
paperback $21.95 | ebook $19.99
The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson—Mormon Author, Feminist, and Activist, Volume 3: 2003–2014
Carol Lynn Pearson
Proposition 8, the 2008 California ballot initiative that overturned the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage, looms large in volume 3 of Carol Lynn Pearson’s diaries. The intense lobbying in favor of the measure by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints caused widespread protests against the church and rifts within congregations, families, and friendships that felt like they might never heal. Pearson documented it all.
When she learned through friends close to church leaders that members of the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles were shocked by the backlash, she wondered, “How do 15 prophets, seers, and revelators not see this coming when the rest of us did?”
A lifelong feminist, Pearson’s diaries also reveal her concerns for gender equality. She chronicles her observations of Ordain Women, a movement by a group of Latter-day Saint feminists who lobbied to change the church’s all-male priesthood. At the end of this volume, Pearson takes on yet another issue: the ongoing Mormon doctrine that polygamy is practiced in the eternities. Pearson heard from thousands of women who feared that they would be forced to share their husbands in the afterlife. The pain of these women propelled her forward into her next book project, challenging the doctrine of “eternal polygamy.”
Even as she faced her own struggles, Pearson buoyed up those around her. She took phone calls, answered letters, and comforted visitors who were hurting because of the church’s policies. She was, for many, a symbol of hope.
FALL 2026
paperback $29.95 | ebook $22.99
Kingdoms of the Night Sky
G. Thomas Burgess
It is 2026, and millions of Americans are getting ready to form separate communities so they may live by the principles taught in The Book of Shem. Calling themselves “Fellows,” they revere Isaac Snow, the deceased author of The Book of Shem, as their prophet. To settle the question of whether he’s a prophet, a fraud, or something else, Snow’s son sets out to tell his father’s story. Inspired by the 1960s folk music revival, and his experiences with the beatniks, hippies, and Mormons, Isaac has crafted a unique message that millions of Americans find irresistible, but only after many years of feeling cursed and forsaken. In a story that blends tragedy, humor, and redemption and is set in New York City, San Francisco, and Provo, Utah, Kingdoms of the Night Sky is a rollicking journey of discovery that reminds us of the fractured nature of reality itself.
SUMMER 2026
paperback $24.95 | ebook $19.99
The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson—Mormon Author,
Feminist, and Activist, Volume 2: 1990–2002
Carol Lynn Pearson
Of these years of her life, poet, writer, and feminist Carol Lynn Pearson says, “The plot thickens, as all good plots do. My life and your life—if we are brave enough—move into areas that we had not anticipated. We feel sometimes that we want to run back to safer ground, but life has decided otherwise and so we take those next steps. Volume two of my diaries gives us a closeup of the years 1990 to 2002, bringing us an abundance of both joy and distress.”
Throughout the 1990s, Pearson records and laments her church’s efforts to punish scholars and activists while celebrating the success of her books and one-woman play, Mother Wove the Morning. Along the way, she comforts the suffering, endures terrible personal loss, and witnesses the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11. “Bless everyone who fights for what is right,” she writes. Few have fought harder than Carol Lynn Pearson.
paperback $29.95 | ebook $22.99
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