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.
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