Announcing The 2024 Long Story Winner

We are happy to announce the winner, runner-up, and finalists of our Iron Horse Literary Review Long Story competition. Iron Horse Literary Review’s annual The Long Story is an opportunity for writers to submit their fiction and nonfiction manuscripts that run between 20-40 pages. Each year we dedicate an e-single to the winner of the submission.

This time, we selected Amy Monticello's "Last Dye" (Nonfiction) as the IHLR Long Story winner. Amy Monticello is the author of Close Quarters, a chapbook memoir about unconventional divorce (Sweet Publications), and the essay collection How to Euthanize a Horse, which won the 2016 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has been published in literary journals such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, under the gum tree, The Iron Horse Literary Review, Hotel Amerika, CALYX, The Rumpus, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies; featured on Salon, The Establishment, Everyday Feminism, Quiet Revolution, and other popular websites; anthologized in Going Om: Real-Life Stories On and Off the Yoga Mat; and listed as notable in Best American Essays. She is also co-author, along with Jason Tucker, of The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing (2023), which is part of Routledge’s Introduction to American Literature series.

2024 Long Story Winner, Amy Monticello

We chose Yvonne Conza's "Hollywood Styles" (Fiction) for the runner-up. Yvonne Conza is a writer in Miami. She has written for Longreads, The Believer, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, Dame Magazine, Joyland Magazine, Pleiades, Chicago Review of Books, Craft Literary, Blue Mesa Review, and other outlets. She is the assistant nonfiction editor for Pithead Chapel and co-author of the user-friendly dog training guide Training for Both Ends of the Leash: A Guide to Cooperation Training for You and Your Dog [Avery]. Yvonne’s a Pushcart Nominee and a finalist in many competitions including the Barry Lopez Creative Nonfiction award, The Raymond Carver Short Story award and others. Find her on Instagram @yvonneconza.

Congratulations to Amy Monticello, Yvonne Conza, and all our finalists!

Finalists:

Brian Wilson, "Closets" (nonfiction)

Wendy Scheir, "What She Knew" (fiction)

Beth Ann Fennelly, "Dear Viewer of My Naked Body" (nonfiction)

Rachel Weinberg, "The Rat King (Muriel's Streetcar)" (fiction)