Below are photos taken at the 2007 meeting, New Author Review, in Cedar City, Utah.
Susan Fancher
Moderator
WILL BAGLEY
Will Bagley is a native of Utah. His column, HISTORY MATTERS, appeared for four years in the Sunday Salt Lake Tribune. He attended Brigham Young University and was a President's Scholar at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he graduated in 1971 with a degree in History. He has written and edited more than a dozen books, including Frontiersman: Abner Blackburn's Narrative, which won the 1991 Evans Manuscript Prize. In 1997, the Arthur H. Clark Company published The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846-1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock, which launched a new documentary history series, KINGDOM IN THE WEST: The Mormons and the American Frontier. Mr. Bagley serves as series editor. The nine published volumes have won awards from the Mormon History Association, the Utah State Historical Society, and Westerners International. Journal of the West called the series "one of the happiest events in recent Western publishing."
Mr. Bagley was a Research Associate at Yale University's Beinecke Library in 2000 and has served as a historical consultant for National Geographic magazine, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Wyoming State Historical Preservtion Office, the Nevada Humanities Council, and more than a dozen documentary films, including th American Experience episode of "The Mormons" on PBS. (Purchase Books)
The University of Oklahoma Press published Mr. Bagley's Blood of the Phrophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows in 2002. The study won the Western Writers of America Spur, the Denver Public Library Brancoft History Prize, Westerners International Best Book, and the Western History Association's Caughey Book Prize for the year's most distinguished book on the history of the American West."While the word 'definitive' is often overused," distinguished historian Brigham Madsen wrote in The Western Historical Quarterly, "this account of the killings merits that distinction."
Mr. Bagley lives in Salt Lake. His documentary history,
Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, edited with David L. Bigler, will appear in the Spring of 2008. He is working on books about Mormon-Indian relations, a multi-volume history of the Oregon-California Trail, and a biography of Judge Wilson McCarthay, president of the D&RGW Railroad. More on Will Bagley.
CHARLES "CHUCK" LARSON
Charles Larson is a native of Michigan who developed an early appreciation for history by being raised in one of the oldest farm houses in Ingham County. His childhood consisted of exposure to old barns, old family a one-room schoolhouse, and the intoduction of in plumbing that happily conincided with the demise of the outhouse by the age of five.
Around the age of eight he was catapulted into the 20th century when his family moved to California, and there he experienced the decade of the 60s before joining the Army in 1969, fresh out of high school. While stil in basic training he encountered another young soldier who belonged to a strange religious sect of nice people that didn't smoke, drink, or do many of the other things that soldiers were fond of doing.
He joined this group with an enthusiasm that managed to sustain him for the next ten years before he finally changed his mind and realized he'd been happier being a "gentile". Thankfully, he managed to graduate from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor's degree in History with a minor in Anthropology shortly before publishing his first book, BY HIS OWN HAND UPON PAPYRUS.
Several years later his interest in coins caused him to do experimental research into pioneer minting methods employed in the American West, and culminated in a paper delivered to the American Numismatic Association entitled REDISCOVERING THE DESERET MINT. This project earned him an invitation to become a member of the Utah Westerner's Association, and led shortly afterwards to the publication of NUMISMATIC FORGERY, which won the Numismatic Literary Guild's Best Book award in 2004.
Currently he has just completed a contemporay crime/action/mystery novel that takes place within the modern state of Utah and has strong historic overtones dealing with Mountain Meadows. Publication of THE DESTROYING ANGEL is currently underway, and is scheduled for release in the spring of 2008. (Purchase Book)
