And the Desert Shall Blossom

And the Desert Shall Blossom by Phyllis Barber ISBN-13: 9780874803631 ISBN-10: 0874803632 stated First Edition: 1st Publisher: Univ of Utah Press - copyright 1991 Hardcover 6.15 x 9.25 inches, 281 pages Phyllis Barber (born Phyllis Nelson on May 11, 1943) is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, often set in the Western United States. She was raised in Boulder City, Nevada and Las Vegas as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). She studied piano at Brigham Young University and moved to Palo Alto, California where her husband studied law at Stanford. There Barber finished her degree in piano at San Jose State College in 1967, and taught and performed piano in California. She studied creative writing at the University of Utah and received an MFA in writing from Vermont College in 1984. She started her writing career by publishing short stories in journals and magazines in the 1980s. Barber's memoir, How I Got Cultured (1991) won the creative nonfiction award for Association of Writers & Writing Programs and the award for autobiography from the Association for Mormon Letters. How I Got Cultured was praised for how Barber describes her complex relationship to the expectations of her religion and the larger "worldly" culture of Las Vegas. Lavina Fielding Anderson described Barber's work as that of an insider describing her faith to outsiders. Barber's novel, And the Desert Shall Blossom (1989) won first prize in the Utah State Literary competition, and many of her short stories have also won awards. She taught writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts from 1991 to 2010, and has taught other various writing workshops. In 1984, she co-founded the annual writer's conference called Writers at Work in Park City, Utah. In 1993, Lavina Fielding Anderson discussed Barber's work in a reflective essay about the state of Mormon women's fiction. She described her work as "insider/outsider" fiction, or fiction where the author presents their Mormonism to outsiders while still being recognizable to other Mormons. Anderson praised The Desert Shall Blossom for the way Barber interpreted Mormonism; "neither pietistically nor simplistically". At 15 Bytes, Jake Clayson spoke positively of Barber's writing in her memoir To The Mountain, describing it as self-aware and disarming How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir won the award for creative nonfiction for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in 1991 and the Association for Mormon Letters award for autobiography in 1993. And the Desert Shall Blossom and "Criminal Justice" won first prizes in the 1988 Utah State Literary Competition. "Bird of Paradise" won third prize in the Dialogue writing awards in 1991. Barber was added to the Nevada Writers hall of fame in 2005. Her essay, "At the Cannery" won the Eugene England Memorial Essay Award from Dialogue in 2009. In 2015, she received the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letter from the Association for Mormon Letters.