Sustainability Writing Awards

2025 UW–Madison Sustainability Writing Awards
Theme: Climate Futures

Eligibility Criteria: All currently enrolled UW–Madison undergraduate, graduate, and professional students are eligible to submit writing. One submission per student will be considered. See below for details.
Last year’s Sustainability Writing Awards invited students to reflect on their lived climate realities, drawing from personal and place-based experiences—from repeated 100-year storms in the Midwest to intensifying coastal flooding on the eastern seaboard to unprecedented heat across the globe. Building from that foundation, the 2025 competition turns toward what comes next.

This year, we invite students to imagine climate futures. These futures might be hopeful, dystopic, techno-utopic, pastoral, degrowth-oriented, fantastical, or hyperlocal. In a moment that distorts our ability to look forward, we hope to focus on the implications of the present, extrapolating them outward.

Questions to Consider

• How do you hope to affect or shape our climate futures—individually, professionally, or within your community?
• How is your view of the future shaped by the geography and experiences you bring with you?
• How have your past or present climate realities influenced the way you imagine what lies ahead?
• What does it mean to envision a climate future within a world marked by uneven experiences, responsibilities, and risks?
• How might grounded creative nonfiction or speculative fiction help extend today’s realities into tomorrow’s possibilities?

Submission Guidelines
Nonfiction submissions (750–1,800 words) and fiction submissions (1,500–3,000 words) will be accepted. Fiction should remain rooted in recognizable realities and clearly extrapolate from the world as it exists today—speculative, but not detached from lived experience.

All submissions are due December 31 at 11:59 p.m.

Awards
Three winners will receive $500 each and publication on the Office of Sustainability website. Winning authors will also have the opportunity to work with an Office of Sustainability editor to refine their pieces prior to publication.

Questions?
Please contact Lauren Graves at lauren.graves@wisc.edu.