Made possible through a partnership with Monday Creek Publishing, this year’s finalists for the manuscript contest are ready to share pieces from the stories they’ve come to know by heart. Their stories are authentic, genuine, complex portrayals of Appalachian stories that we are proud to help send off into the world. 

• Haley Devore, Untethered

  • Untethered is a speculative fiction novel that weaves the scenery and culture of Appalachia with dystopian themes. Twenty-eight-year-old Georgia Boone has survived the collapse of the world from her family’s remote mountain farm in Eastern Tennessee. Bloodmouths—zombie-like creatures—roam the wilderness, and trust is as scarce as an ally. Georgia prefers working alone. But when a bet with her best friend, Noah Maddox, leads her to the deadly Talona Rapids she is swept away and presumed dead. Georgia awakens in a sterile pod with an unbelievable revelation: everything she grew to know in life was never real. It’s all part of a simulated experiment designed to test human resilience and limits in a long-since destroyed world. The only hope of resistance lies with a group of partially awakened test subjects inside the simulation—The Untethered Collective—where Georgia is tasked with gaining the trust of their reluctant, sharp-witted member, Knox Thatcher. Georgia must navigate a world she now knows is fake, while her memories begin to fray and a dangerous antagonist closes in. As Georgia fights to dismantle the experiment and save those she cares about, she’s forced to question the line between real and unreal. Untethered is a survival journey about pushing your limits and fighting for what it means to truly live.

  • BIO: Haley DeVore is a science and speculative fiction author from Southeastern Ohio who loves weaving the unknown into the environment around her for her stories. Her published work includes three short stories and a self-published collection of poetry. Her work was featured at the ALAS Festival in their Call and Response exhibit in 2024. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys spending time outside and traveling. Haley is currently working on her second full-length fiction manuscript and another poetry collection. She and her Tortie cat, Leia, proudly call Athens, Ohio home.

• Joshua Dyer, This Bitter Earth

  • This Bitter Earth - When Bud Fields returns home after serving his thirty-year sentence, he finds some things in the hamlet of Mcwhorter, West Virginia have remained frozen in time, while others have moved on without him. Destructive ripples from one foolish decision as a teenager continue to reach across time and space. His parents are divorced and his sister a single mother of two nieces he’s never met. Bud wants forgiveness from a family torn asunder. He longs to redeem himself and reunite his family. Maybe rekindle an old romance with his girlfriend from high school. The specters of Bud’s past aren’t far behind, though. One of his cell mates gets out on probation, and he has plans of his own that include Bud keeping a promise. Bud finds his old flame, Angie, and sparks relationship. She, too, has changed with time. Her secret addiction to OxyContin threatens her life. Bud also learns his father’s dying of black lung and planning to sell the family farm. As he tries to pull his family, his life, and the farm together, Bud loses his dad to black lung. Soon after, Angie dies from an overdose. His old prison pal, Butch, forces Bud into being the gang’s getaway driver against his protestations. When Bud still refuses, they kidnap his niece. Bud sets out to do the bank heist. He confronts Butch and rescues his niece. In the end, he saves his family farm and takes over its operations with a renewed sense of purpose and belonging.

  • BIO: Joshua Dyer was born and raised in West Virginia. He attended West Virginia University, earning a B.F.A. in 1999 in world percussion. Dyer went on to earn a second B.S. degree in Recording Industries from Middle Tennessee State University in 2002. After five years in the music business in Nashville, Tennessee, he returned to his native home of West Virginia. Here he re-invented himself as an author and novelist. Today, Dyer serves as a professional linguist where he's been for the last sixteen years. His constant interaction with various languages and cultures suffuse into the characters and worlds he creates.

• Lishea Goff, Torn Together

  • Torn Together is part one in a series that follows Louella, a college student and waitress in a small West Virginia town, as she navigates love, trauma, and a growing web of unsettling secrets. Battling mental illness, identity confusion, and a deep sense of displacement, Louella clings to the familiarity of routine—serving tables by day, editing papers at night, and quietly unraveling inside. Her fragile sense of control begins to slip when she falls for Colt, a gentle, artistic soul whose hands feel like home but whose past is tightly guarded. As their connection deepens, so does the mystery surrounding him—and a vibrant, otherworldly woman named Venus begins to appear with cryptic warnings about a group called the Nyxlooms and their path to becoming Shadow Walkers. Louella is thrust into a surreal reality where time bends, disappearances go unnoticed, and even her own memories seem questionable. At the center of it all is Colt, whose loyalty may lie with something much more powerful than love. Torn between two versions of herself—the one she performs and the one trying to survive—Louella must choose whether to run, submit, or stand her ground. Torn Together blends mental illness, magical realism, and slow-burning romance into a story about perception, power, and the price of being seen. Twists and turns at every corner keep Louella herself uncertain of what’s next.

  • BIO: Lishea Goff is a mother of two, wife of one, and holds degrees in Literature and ESL from Fairmont State University, where she worked on the literary magazine Kestrel and journal Whetstone as editor, publisher, and digital designer. She’s now in her sixth year as an ELA teacher and is certified to teach gifted learners. She’s published many pieces—some under her name, others as a ghostwriter. Writing has always been her outlet to let out all of the internal catastrophes, constructing them into something worth feeling. Outside of teaching and writing, she loves to bake, especially during her annual bagel-baking day with her dad.

• Amy Le Ann Richardson, Shadow of Footprints

  • Shadow of Footprints is a poignant novella set in contemporary Appalachia. The story follows Leah, a woman reckoning with the echoes of her past. Through evocative flashbacks to the 1970s, an era marked by economic decline, a return to traditional ways of life, and growing concerns over land development and environmental degradation, the narrative traces Leah’s coming-of-age within a family shaped by loss. As she navigates childhood in a home shadowed by her mother’s untimely death, Leah’s bond with her father, Will, and her grandmother, Essie, becomes central to her journey of memory, identity, and resilience.

  • BIO: Amy Le Ann Richardson is the author of Make Believe Worlds We Built Together (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Who You Grow Into (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and Out of Places (Pine Row Press, 2025). Her poetry explores memory, identity, environmental change, and the relationships between people and place, and has appeared in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Untelling, Kentucky Monthly, and Still: The Journal. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University and has received grants and fellowships from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Amy lives on her family farm in Carter County, Kentucky, where she writes, grows food, makes maple syrup, and homeschools her children with her husband, Channing.

• George Wood, The King of Clemens

  • The King of Clemens - Ike James, hiding from the Vietnam draft and running from his father’s dementia, tries and fails in his attempt to thru hike the Appalachian Trail. Coming off the trail he hitch-hikes his way to the home of a fiercely independent boot maker and learns to be a cordwainer. When Leroy, the boot maker, decides it is time for James to move on, he chases trout on the rivers and streams of the Appalachian Mountains until he stops for breakfast in the small, dying town of Clemens. There he is befriended by Katie, the boisterous, gossipy, proprietor of the town diner and opens a boot factory in one of the town’s many abandoned buildings. By the time the draft ends, he has married Caroline, the town doctor, and the factory has become a success. Choosing to stay in Clemens, he leads quixotic battles to save the village from thrift stores, abandoned houses, reckless speeders, indifferent state bureaucrats, and school consolidators, once enlisting several Hellbender lizards to stave off a highway bypass. Years after he makes a mistake that nearly costs him his marriage and estranges him from his only child, the dementia that took his father preys on him and causes a misstep that rallies the entire town.

  • BIO: George Wood lives in the foothills of the Appalachians in the small town of Amesville, Ohio. The town is his inspiration for Clemens, the fictional town his stories concern, and the townspeople would probably both want to claim and disavow any likeness to them in his writing. (Like Betty in his novel, one of them did run up a water bill that she will never live long enough to pay off.) George has published several books on education and served as the high school principal and superintendent. He has had short stories, also based around the town of Clemens, published in Reckon Review and Flash Fiction Magazine. The King of Clemens would be his first novel.