Looking Back at the Writing Fellows Program’s 2018

2018 has been a big year for AF’s Writing Fellows Program. In June of this year, I had the privilege of joining the program staff to help grow and improve the writing fellowship. It’s been a pleasure to work with the program staff, fellows and alumni to help give more people the skills to be effective communicators of free-market principles. I’m happy to share a few highlights from the last year, as we look toward an even bigger 2019.

The Alumni Dinner
This year, we re-launched the annual alumni dinner. AF alumni joined us in DC to reconnect with their classes and build new connections while hearing from our keynote speaker, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review. We also recognized the work of several writing fellows, giving the Aumni Achievement Award to Chelsea Follett for her work as managing editor of HumanProgress.org, the Op-ed of the Year award to Tyler Bonin for his Wall Street Journal op-ed “My Advice to Grads: Start Mopping,” and AF Blog Post of the year to Lynn Hu for her post “How I Became Disillusioned with Communism.”

AFF’s Growing Program
This year we’ve set new records for the size of the Writing Fellows Program. We’ve trained 58 new writing fellows, 24 of whom were part of our fall class — the largest we’ve had so far. In fact, for the first time, we’ve split the program into separate in-person and virtual classes in order to reach even more young writers while still maintaining the small class sizes that give our fellows the chance to interact personally with our guest speakers. This year, those guest speakers included incredibly talented people like Stephanie Slade of Reason, Ginger Gibson of Reuters, Ingrid Jacques of Detroit News, and Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner.

Our Alumni
All of this growth wouldn’t be possible without the work the alumni have done to direct promising young writers to our program. During the fall, nearly a quarter of all fellows came to the program through an alumni referral. And beyond helping us grow, the alumni have been doing amazing work for themselves. This year, alumni of the program have published more than 2,700 articles under byline. The AF blog highlights some of this work every week, though these features only scratch the surface of the remarkable things the alumni are doing.

Graduates of the program now serve as editors, commentary writers, senior policy analysts, congressional communications directors, and more. We’re excited to see where our alumni go and to help them and many more writing fellows to come, in 2019 and beyond.