James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature. Born in Provo into a family with Sikh, Jewish, and Mormon roots, Goldberg inherited interests in both migration and the ways religious imaginations have shaped the world. After moving from Orem to Columbus, Ohio and then serving as a missionary in the former East Germany, he returned to Utah in 2006 to help develop Mormon literary community.
From 2006-2009, Goldberg led the New Play Project, a Provo theater company dedicated exclusively to original work, including work with Mormon themes and motifs. In 2012, he co-founded the Mormon Lit Blitz, a contest for Mormon micro-literature. Goldberg later helped expand the scope of the project to bring international Mormon literary work to English-speaking audiences in translation. From 2013-2019, Goldberg also worked for the History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, developing new narrative approaches to the faith’s history.
Goldberg won the Association for Mormon Letters Drama Award in 2008 for his play Prodigal Son and the AML Novel Award in 2012 for The Five Books of Jesus. He is a two-time recipient of project development grants from the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. His theater for young audiences play The Valiant Chattee-Maker was supported by a city of Orem CARE grant.
Within the state’s literary landscape, Goldberg has worked to find ways to express religious insight and longing in a literary register. In his review of The First Five-Dozen Tales of Razia Shah, novelist Dave Butler noted, “Goldberg’s compassionate, patient, wise, ironic view of humanity is spiritual to the point of mysticism, deeply literate, and urgently relevant.”
Goldberg is married to Nicole Wilkes Goldberg. They and their four children currently reside in American Fork.
Works
Prayer on the Red Sea Shore
Prayer on the Red Sea Shore
If these walls of water fall, O Lord,
let me drown with Moses.
And let me praise you with my final breath
for lending me his mad, prophetic dream
for letting me wander out past the edge of this world
beside a man who could see all the glory of Egypt
and still say it wasn't enough.
If these walls of water fall, O Lord,
let me drown with Moses.
Yes, let me die with the same fire in my eyes
Moses saw in a desert bush.
Turn of a Century
Turn of a Century
First the covenant
next the kingdom
then the oppressor’s hand on our throats
Now comes the alchemic era
when we turn this leaden feeling into gold
and bury our forbidden dreams
deep in every saint’s heart
You who inherit
our unfinished business—
don’t mistake it for emptiness.
Know this
when you walk the streets
of an alien future:
we hid cities inside you.
And who can tell what wildernesses
they will fill when you finally
find a way
to let them out?
Exile
Exile
In November the judgment came down—
to deport me from the land of the living
though I had not been called to the land of the dead.
They put me on the first boat to a place in between
and I wandered as a stranger
until I learned the customs of that other country
where time flows like sap
and every pebble is a mountain,
where the rain is a life-preserving poison.
When I lost my hair for the second time,
they made me a naturalized citizen of the place
and gave me a room in a tower for the desperate:
I paced its halls and watched human will
stripped down to the bone,
to the marrow of the bone—
but in that place we still laughed
and learned each others’ names.
Someday, they say, we’ll all leave this land
across the one or the other sea.
Every day the shores I was sent from seem further
and the waves between us
wash the colors of my memories away,
until all that is left is a yearning—
for the one or the other
forgotten home.
The Questions I Beg My Bible to Answer: June 2018
The Questions I Beg My Bible to Answer: June 2018
Why are the Egyptians
afraid of the Hebrews?
What moves Pharaoh’s gaze
out the palace window
from the glory of the
pyramids to the hunched
backs of foreign-looking
workers (their brows
bleeding sweat, their
hands caked in mud):
why does the strength
in their aching arms
trouble his dreams
each night?
Why are the Egyptians
afraid of the Hebrews?
What makes the general
in his chariot stop and
shiver at the distant
echo of a birthing scream
rising from the hovel
where the great-granddaughter
of a half-starved refugee
is delivering a son?
Oh God, please just
help me understand:
why are the Egyptians
afraid of the Hebrews?
What makes an aging
civilization, haunted
by mirages of its own
bygone youth, turn away
from its treasure cities
and toward the straining
figures of desperate families
determined only to choose
life—what makes them give
the order to tear children
from their mothers’ arms?
Bibliography
- The Five Books of Jesus, Beant Kaur Books, 2012.
- Let Me Drown with Moses, Beant Kaur Books, 2015.
- Phoenix Song, Beant Kaur Books, 2018.
- Remember the Revolution, Beant Kaur Books, 2019.
- The First Five-Dozen Tales of Razia Shah, Beant Kaur Books, 2019.
Links
