2024 Fishtrap Fellows

Since 1990, Fishtrap has awarded more than 150 Fellowships to new and emerging writers, many of whom have gone on to become award-winning authors and respected educators. A Fishtrap Fellowship includes full registration to the Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers, lodging, meals, and a featured reading during the week. Fishtrap is able to provide Fellowships through the generous support from individuals and foundations.

A Fishtrap Fellowship covers the cost of the seven-day conference including a five-day writing workshop, readings, activities, panel discussions, and special events. A Fishtrap Fellowship is valued at more than $1200, but more than that, it is an opportunity for emerging writers to build new friendships and a renewed sense of creative potential in an atmosphere of mentorship and community.

Meet the 2024 Summer Fishtrap Fellows

Autumn Bettinger is short-form fiction writer and full-time mother of two living in Portland, Oregon. When not folding laundry or slinging snacks, she can be found writing in the wee hours of the morning before her children wake up. She has won the Tadpole Press 100-Word Writing Contest, the Silver Scribes Prize, and has been highly commended in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards. Her work has been audio adapted for The No Sleep Podcast and her stories can be found in The Journal of Compressed Literary Arts, The Good Life Review, On The Run, and others.

Isabelle Eastman is a fiction writer from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and currently lives in Spokane, Washington, where she is an MFA candidate and composition instructor at Eastern Washington University. Her work explores haunted houses, motherhood, and the magic of whales.

2024 Fishtrap Fellowship Judge: Derek Sheffield

Derek Sheffield is the author of Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is the co-editor, with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and, with Elizabeth Bradfield and CMarie Fuhrman, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His awards include a special mention in the 2016 Pushcart Anthology and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. Derek lives on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.