Application period is closed. Meet the 2024 Summer Fishtrap Fellows!
Fishtrap Fellowships recognize and encourage writers who show promise at an early stage in their career. The primary benefit of this award is an opportunity to attend the Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers, July 8-14, 2024 at Wallowa Lake. Each Fishtrap Fellow receives early workshop registration and a featured reading during the week. Fellows are also highlighted in Fishtrap promotional materials, press releases, and on the Fishtrap website.
A Fishtrap Fellowship covers the cost of the seven-day conference including a five-day writing workshop, readings, activities, panel discussions, and special events. Fishtrap Fellows also receive meals and lodging for the week, and a $150 travel stipend. A Fishtrap Fellowship is valued at more than $1400, 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.
Judging Process and Eligibility
Fishtrap Fellowships support emerging writers whose work shows promise of excellence. Applicants can be of any age, but must be in the early stages of their writing careers and will not have had the support needed to achieve major recognition for their work. We define “emerging writer” as someone who is not on faculty at a college or university, has not yet published a book by a literary publisher or under contract to a publisher for a book. Eligible applicants may have been published in magazines, chapbooks, zines, or in print and online literary journals.
Fishtrap accepts submissions in the genres of Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction/Memoir. In keeping with Fishtrap’s mission, “To promote good writing and clear thinking in and about the West,” applicants should live in the Western US or write about themes surrounding the West. Your cover letter and resumé will help us make that determination.
Applications are screened for completeness and eligibility. Writing samples are reviewed by Preliminary Judges who select 3-5 finalists from each genre. Applicant names are not sent to the Judges, they only see a applicant’s writing sample. Finalists are then forwarded to the final Fellowship Judge who selects the 2024 Fellowship awards.
Fellowship applications are accepted November 1 through December 15, 2023.
Notifications for the 2024 Fellowship awards will arrive by January 30, 2024.
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.