Announcing the 2024 Chapbook Winner

Photo Credit: Polina Kovaleva

Iron Horse Literary Review is proud to announce the winner of this year’s chapbook contest, Dough Emory’s chapbook, The Topography of Isolation, a small collection of stories set among the mountain ranges in the American West.

The stories in the chapbook are authoritative—rich in detail as well as emotion, fully representative of Emory’s experience as a mountaineer. The characters here are caught in stories of grief and isolation, and the narrative turns they take, the decisions they make, are mesmerizing and so very human. Their distinct personalities and dilemmas skillfully propel the stories forward as the characters (and the writer) take risk after risk. We love and enjoy how the terrain of the American West also acts as character and is inextricably linked to the plot and outcomes of each tale. 

Our contest winner, Doug Emory grew up outside Chicago and completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature at Northern Illinois University. With his graduate degree behind him, he took an impromptu vacation, driving all night to Denver, Colorado. As he neared the city, he pulled onto the shoulder of Interstate 70 and watched the Front Range peaks take shape in the dawn light. He decided at that moment to continue his education and begin exploring the outdoors in the American West—which is clearly where he found inspiration for the stories in his winning chapbook.

He studied Victorian literature at Arizona State University, broke in a pair of hiking boots, and then accepted a position teaching for a college with sites on the Hopi and Navajo reservations and in the border towns of Northern Arizona. After five years teaching writing and GED, he detoured to study public policy at the University of Colorado, then ceased his wanderings by settling in the Seattle area, where he worked for the Washington State college system as an educational administrator and tenured instructor in writing and the humanities. Today, Doug lives with his wife and younger of two sons near Seattle, and works as a freelance writer and educational consultant. His range of publications includes a textbook on college writing, academic analyses of pedagogical innovations, a hiking guidebook, and numerous articles on climbing, cross-country skiing, and mountaineering culture. His short stories and adventure narratives have been short-listed in major writing competitions and published in premier national climbing magazines such as Rock and Ice and Alpinist.

To learn more about some of our previous issues and to purchase them, click here.