2024 Emerging Writers Essay Contest: Selected Winners

Look out for the selected essays from this year’s Emerging Writers Essay Contest with the Waterman Fund soon to be published in Appalachia Journal with Appalachian Mountain Club.

Winner: “Old Friends in the Alpine” by Catherine Wessel

Catherine Wessel is a field ecologist and recent graduate of the Field Naturalist Masters Program at University of Vermont. Her selected essay was inspired by a transformative experience with a previous researcher who visited her on Mount Mansfield. She witnessed his return to this beloved place after being away for nearly thirty years, which offered access to thinking on greater time scales, as well as what the human expression of wholeheartedness and delight in the work could look like, as one grapples with how climate change has and has been impacting alpine areas of the Northeast.

(photograph: Catherine Wessel on Mount Mansfield, 2024)

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Runner up: “Splinter Hill” by Samantha Sapp

Samantha Sapp is an MFA student at Miami University and former middle school English teacher. Though she is originally from the Florida panhandle, she has spent the last few years in the Midwest coping poorly with winter. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several literary journals, including Sinister Wisdom, Mount Hope Magazine, and Screen Door Review.

(photograph: Samantha Sapp, 2024)

Congratulations to both Catherine and Samantha for their continued work in stewardship of wild places.

And thank you to all those who submitted work to the Fund. Every year our essay committee is truly inspired by the submissions we receive, which makes our task both challenging and wildly rewarding.

Visit our website to find out how to enter next year’s Emerging Writers Essay Contest and the prompt for 2025! (Submissions are always free and open to all emerging writers.)