New Volume Collects 60+ Col. Darron L. Wright Award-winning Stories & Poems

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Editors of Chicago-based non-profit literary journal Line of Advance (www.LineOfAdvance.org) have announced a new, second volume collecting the prize-winning prose and poetry from the annual Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards.

Launching Nov. 2, 2025 and collecting prize-winners from 2021-2025, Volume 2 of “Our Best War Stories” will be available both as a 340-page trade paperback, and an exclusive Amazon Kindle e-book. E-book pre-orders are available here at this link.

The new volume also includes special sections of writing prompts, prize-winner insights, and more!

Now celebrating its 10th year, the Wright awards annually recognize excellence in prose and poetry by U.S. military service members and veterans. In 2020, contest organizers added categories for immediate family members.

Cash prizes of $250, $150, and $100 are now awarded in each of four categories.

“The Line of Advance proudly serves as a leading venue for the best of ‘veterans-lit,’ with works by men and women who have served in all uniforms and in all eras,” says the journal’s editor-in-chief Christopher Lyke. “We are also grateful to the underwriters of our cash prizes, who, through their generosity, help promote creatively crafted veterans’ stories to wider audiences.”

The contest’s 2025 guest judge is U.S. Navy veteran Jillian Danback-McGhan, author of the 2024 short-story collection “Midwatch” (Split/Lip Press) and herself a 2020 Wright winner in prose.

“It isn’t an exaggeration to say the Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards are the reason that I’m a writer,” says Danback-McGhan. “This competition showcased the richness of perspectives from veterans and military families. Writers spanned multiple conflicts, styles of writing, and branches of service. Reading these stories and poems felt like watching a band at a small venue, knowing that one day they would strike it big.”

Administered by the Line of Advance journal since 2016, and underwritten by the Blake and Bailey Family Foundation, the awards commemorate a U.S. Army leader and author who was killed in a September 2013 parachute training accident. Darron L. Wright, 45, had deployed three times to Iraq, and was author of a 2012 memoir “Iraq Full Circle: From Shock and Awe to the Last Combat Patrol in Baghdad and Beyond.”

Middle West Press LLC (www.MiddleWestPress.com) is an Iowa-based U.S. veteran-owned micro-publisher of non-fiction, genre fiction, journalism, and poetry. As an independent micro-press, it publishes one to four titles annually. Its anthologies, collections, and other projects often feature the unique perspectives and narratives of the American Midwest.

Connect with Middle West Press via social media and other venues here: linktr.ee/middlewestpress


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