What’s Cooking at Signature Books in 2023?

Signature Books Podcast

In this episode, marketing manager Devery Anderson discusses with company director Barbara Jones Brown and managing editor John Hatch a few of Signature’s forthcoming titles . This episode is sure to whet your appetite for some great books in biography, documentary history, contemporary issues, and memoir.

Just released, Dan Vogel’s magisterial Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839, sheds new life on Smith’s middle years in Kirtland, Ohio, and Far West, Missouri. Sara M. Patterson’s The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism, coming out this September, is a thirty-year retrospective on an era of anti-intellectualism, anti-feminism, and anti-homosexuality in the LDS Church that resulted in disciplinary actions against church members who fell into these categories. Kenneth L. Cannon’s George Q. Cannon: Politician, Publisher, Apostle of Polygamy, to be published this summer, promises to be an enlightening title joining several others in our Brief Mormon Biographies series. Also coming this summer is D. Michael Quinn’s Chosen Path: A Memoir, a highly anticipated book by one of Mormonism’s most prolific–and enigmatic–historians. Another summer title will be the two-volume diary edited by Noel A. Carmack and Charles M. Hatch, Useful to the Church and Kingdom: The Journals of James H. Martineau, Pioneer and Patriarch, 1850–1918. This important work sheds light on countless events in Utah and Latter-day Saint history that he witnessed and wrote about on a near-daily basis. Finally, we discuss a forthcoming anthology of essays by Mormon and Mormon-adjacent LGBTQ+ writers about their personal experiences in seeking and achieving Queer joy.