Margaret Blair Young: Mormon Author
Margaret Blair Young is a novelist, playwright, and writing instructor. Her work has won numerous awards from the Utah Arts Council, including Best Short Story Collection for Elegies and Love Songs (which also garnered Best Short Story Collection of the Year from the Association of Mormon Letters), Best Novel of the Year in 1992 for Salvador, and Best Novel of the Year in 1995 for Merry's Daughters. Her other titles include Heresies of Nature, House Without Walls, and Love Chains.
She coauthored three historical novels and made two documentaries with Darius Gray on the subject of race issues in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The trilogy is called Standing on the Promises and the documentaries are "Jane Manning James: Your Sister in the Gospel" and "Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons". She wrote an award-winning play, "I Am Jane", also about Black Mormon pioneer Jane Manning James, which has been produced throughout the United States. She wrote the screenplay for Heart of Africa, a film that Sterling Van Wagenen is reportedly directing.[1] She worked as the project director for the film The Wisdom of Our Years, produced by the Utah chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. Young has also authored encyclopedia articles on Blacks in the western United States.
She received her bachelor's and master’s degrees from Brigham Young University where she teaches creative writing. She is a past president of the Association for Mormon Letters. Young and her husband, Bruce, a BYU professor of English, are the parents of four children.