Brockport, PA — The WCoNA Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia® (here and after WCoNA) is pleased to announce its longlist for the 2025 WCoNA Book of the Year. This annual prize celebrates writers whose work captures the spirit and essence of northern Appalachia.
Among the authors longlisted are Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Creative Nonfiction Foundation, and National Writing Project fellows. They’ve been recognized by numerous other awards and honors, including the Golden Quill Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, Best American Essays, and Best American Travel Writing. Their writing has been featured in the Northern Appalachian Review, Orion, The Gettysburg Review, Terrain, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
About this award WCoNA President PJ Piccirillo says, “At WCoNA, our mission is to honor and elevate the remarkable authors and literature of northern Appalachia through programs accessible to all our writers. The Book of the Year team continues to seek and recognize work from emerging and seasoned authors who illuminate the heritage and evolving spirit of this distinct yet diverse part of the world, adding to a canon long overdue in the world of American letters.”
Past winners have included Smoke to See By by Ben Moyer (Catamount/Sunbury Press), And It All Came Tumbling Down by Hannah Allman Kennedy (Watershed Journal Literary Group), Goshen Road by Bonnie Proudfoot (Swallow Press), and Appalachia North by Matthew Ferrence (West Virginia University Press).
The shortlist will be released the first week of January, and the winner will be announced at our annual conference on March 8, 2025 at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania.
2025 Longlist for the WCoNA Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia Book of the Year
Torli Bush. Requiem for Redbird.
Clyde Hill Publishing
The poems in Requiem for a Redbird begin with themes in Appalachia, end by reflecting on the country as a whole, and thread throughout the complexities of death, intimacy, politics, and faith. According to the author, it is ultimately meant to be a work of joy and hope that points beyond itself: one that subverts the stereotypes of their home region, speaks truth to power, and seeks an open table of reconciliation.
Todd Davis and Noah Davis, et al. A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia.
University of Georgia Press
Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis and Noah Davis recognize and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science.
Matthew Ferrence. I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay.
West Virginia University Press
In essays focused on showing goats at the county fair, planting native grasses in the front lawn, the political power of poetry, and getting wiped out in an election, Ferrence’s I Hate it Here, Please Vote for Me offers a counter-narrative to stereotypes of monolithic rural American voters and emphasizes the way stories told about rural America are a source for the bitter divide between Red America and Blue America.
Sherrie Flick. Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist.
University of Nebraska Press
Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist traces the creative coming of age of a mill-town feminist. Sherrie Flick, whose childhood spanned the 1970s rise and 1980s collapse of the steel industry, returned to Pittsburgh in the late 1990s, witnessing the region’s before and its after.
Jeffrey Frazier. Pennsylvania Fireside Tales Volume I
Catamount Press
The intent of Pennsylvania Fireside Tales Volume I, and subsequent volumes, of the Pennsylvania Fireside Tales series, is to preserve the Keystone State’s older folktales and legends, and to bring them to the attention of the current generation, who may not know that the history of this state is filled with tales of human interest that rival anything that can be seen on television or in the movie theaters of today.
Laura Jackson. Deep & Wild: On Mountains, Opossums, & Finding Your Way in West Virginia.
Autumn House Press
In her debut essay collection Deep & Wild, Laura Jackson, employs her knowledge of and curiosity for the region to describe life in West Virginia as it actually is while dismantling stereotypes portrayed in popular media with humor and tenderness. Jackson, a lifelong West Virginian, works to describe what is special about her home, looking head-on at all the ways life in West Virginia may be wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly. Moving beyond all-too-common Appalachian stories of hardship and poverty, Jackson’s collection revels in joy, family, and nature.
Catamount Press
Life in Appalachia is like a kid standing in the center of a seesaw. It’s a fragile balance, somewhere between the old world and the new, flat-broke or getting by, rooted in place or getting out. Sometimes, folks here lose footing, lean too far one way or another. If one end of the seesaw comes down hard, it knocks them right off.
But it’s not hardship that defines these folks. Rather, it’s their dynamic nature, their resilience that spurs them to get on with life the best they can. With little resources, no easy pass, no money-bought solution, no ready way out, the short stories In the Cut will leave you somewhere between the balance and the fall.
Andy McPhee. Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town.
University of Pittsburgh Press
Donora Death Fog details how six fateful days in Donora led to the nation’s first clean air act in 1955, and how such catastrophes can lead to successful policy change. Andy McPhee tells the very human story behind this ecological disaster: how wealthy industrialists built the mills to supply an ever-growing America; how the town’s residents—millworkers and their families—willfully ignored the danger of the mills’ emissions; and how the gradual closing of the mills over the years following the tragedy took its toll on the town.
ABOUT WCONA
The Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia (WCONA) brings together writers and others interested in the region’s literature to honor our distinct body of work and to enhance the craft of our authors. WCoNA is a catalyst to inspire more novels, poetry, essays, history, memoir, drama, and other modes of literary writing that represent, in some way, northern Appalachia, and so create and promote a canon of writers and writing of northern Appalachia.
From the Publisher: "In this “smart, irreverent secret history” (Stewart O’Nan) Sewickley set novel by highly praised Pittsburgh native author Anna Read more
From the Publisher: "In his debut collection of nonfiction, Jim Daniels writes about trees, backyard swing sets, above-ground swimming pools, Read more
New York, NY — The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), the national nonprofit organization that for 58 years Read more
From the Publisher: "Imagine that you are a child who was born in a large family, and during your childhood, Read more
From Mt. Lebanon Magazine by way of Facebook: "On February 18, the Mt. Lebanon Public Library Board of Trustees passed Read more
"The City of Pittsburgh, with funding through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), is launching the Support for Artists Grant Read more
Littsburgh's founder Rachel Ekstrom Courage (now a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author!) recently stopped by KDKA to Read more
"The Drue Heinz Literature Prize recognizes and supports writers of short fiction and makes their work available to readers around Read more
"Applications are now open for Read Local Eat Local 2025! This is event is on Saturday, September 6, from 11 Read more
"Calling all plot twisters, world builders, and romance stirrers! Join fellow genre lovers, top-tier agents, sharp-eyed editors, and bestselling authors Read more
PITTSBURGH — Prime Stage Theatre celebrates its 29th season with three world premieres commissioned from three Pittsburgh playwrights: Nov. 7-16, 2025 – Mr. Read more
PITTSBURGH, PA – It’s time to book your spot! Registration for the 2025 Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books is officially Read more
"United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania hosted its seventh annual Big Book Drop event on April 15-17 at Acrisure Stadium, where Read more
From the Publisher: "The Mackenzies and the Flahertys, two of the founding families of Port Kenneth, TN, have been feuding Read more
"The Northern Appalachia Review welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction written about, representing, or engaging with the experience of Read more
But this too is true: stories can save us The writer Tim O’Brien calls storytelling an essential human activity. "The Read more
"'Where do you end and I begin?' is the question which haunts Shaheen Dil’s remarkable memoir-in-poems. Dil’s journey is at Read more
"A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America—written by an Read more
City of Asylum Pittsburgh and International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) collaborate to present 30+ free,transformational events over 4 days Read more
From the Publisher: "In 1958, a midwestern family was uprooted from Canton, Ohio to Bukavu in the Belgian Congo during Read more
