Catamount Press: Ambition in the Mountains Anthology (Creative NF)
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Ambition in the Mountains: Northern Appalachia and the Making of the Gilded Age
Catamount Press seeks creative nonfiction essays for its forthcoming anthology, Ambition in the Mountains: Northern Appalachia and the Making of the Gilded Age.
The Gilded Age is often remembered as a national story of railroads, oil, steel, industrial fortunes, political corruption, and vast inequality. But much of that story was made in the mountains.
Across Northern Appalachia, industry tore through the land, taking timber, oil, and coal. It extracted wealth from the ground and labor from our people, including immigrants who came with dreams and ambition. This was a region of opportunity and exploitation, industrial promise and environmental harm, freedom-seeking and racial violence, ambition and corruption.
During this era, the American Dream often became a gilded promise while many built inland empires. Northern Appalachia coal and steel fueled expansion, as countless thousands rode wagons, rails, and rivers to the West.
This anthology will focus on the arc of the Gilded Age, 1840–1900, across the northern and north central Appalachian counties of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, and New York, as designated by the Appalachian Regional Commission. We are looking for essays that treat Northern Appalachia as central to the making of industrial America and reflect the complicated tensions and frictions the region experienced as a result.
We welcome work rooted in places such as Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Oil City, Titusville, Johnstown, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Williamsport, Bramwell, Elkins, Morgantown, Parkersburg, Wheeling, Frostburg, Harpers Ferry, Cumberland, Marietta, Steubenville, Youngstown, Jamestown, Orlean, Corning, the New York Southern Tier, and more.
Possible subjects include oil booms and busts, coal mining, coke production, steel and iron, logging, tanneries, railroads, canals, distilling, livestock and agrarian economies, immigrant labor, family life, environmental damage, muckraking and yellow journalism, the Civil War, divided loyalties, slavery in border communities, freedom-seekers, emancipation, and the Underground Railroad.
We are not seeking academic essays or historical fiction. We want creative nonfiction grounded in fact and with attention to narrative, lyricism, scene, image, research, and voice. We seek work that can hold the contradictions of an era that built and broke northern Appalachia.
Submission Guidelines:
- Creative nonfiction essays of 750–3,000 words
- Please use Garamond, size 12 font, and double-space the submission
- Include a 50-word biography in your cover letter
- Include a brief source note for historical material
- Submission deadline: September 30, 2026
- Do not submit works generated in whole or in part by AI. Editing tools like Grammarly, ProWriting Aid, and PerfectIt are the only acceptable uses of AI. Generative uses are not welcome for this call.