Kim Weldin: Winner of the 2026 TTU Press/IHLR First Book Prize

Iron Horse Literary Review and TTU Press are thrilled to announce that Kim Weldin’s short story collection DISAPPEARING ACTS, has won the 2026 TTU Press/IHLR First Book Prize.

Disappearing Acts explores the inner lives of women caught between longing and reinvention. Across fifteen stories, female characters strain against the confines of marriage, motherhood, dead-end routines, and inherited expectations, searching for meaning through acts both imagined and extreme. Set primarily between the American Southeast and the Pacific Northwest, these stories trace the quiet desperation, dark humor, and unruly desires that emerge when escape begins to feel like survival.

An anxious wife discovers an escape pod that becomes a private site of pleasure and self-invention. A group of ghost-light-hunting teenage girls are unfazed after witnessing a fatal car accident. After hearing about a friend’s MDMA-assisted therapy, a restless mother turns to street drugs in search of transformation. In a reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood, a girl befriends a Coors Light Beer Wolf who helps her escape an abusive home life through dissociation.

At a moment when distraction and digital escape shape so much of modern life, the stories in Disappearing Acts examine the hidden impulses beneath isolation, exposing the human hunger for connection, transformation, and a life that feels fully inhabited.

KIM WELDIN is a writer and musician from Charleston, South Carolina. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Appalachian Review, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, BULL, and others. She participated in the Juniper Summer Writing Institute’s Fiction Workshop with Jeff Parker and held a residency at the Lillian E. Smith Center.  She has served as a fiction reader for Split/Lip Press since 2024. Disappearing Acts will be her first book, and she is currently working on her first novel.