Sustainability Writing Awards

2024 UW–Madison Sustainability Writing Awards
Theme: Realities

Eligibility Criteria: All currently enrolled UW–Madison undergraduate, graduate, and professional students are eligible to submit nonfiction writing. Only one submission per student will be considered. See below for details.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison enrolls nearly 48,000 students from all 50 United States and about 6,000 international students from over 130 countries. This means that many of the university’s students have distinctive, place-based experiences of global climate change. Those experiences might include repeated 100-year storms in the Midwest, intensifying coastal flooding on the eastern seaboard, or record-shattering heat in many countries across the world. In short, the lived reality of climate change varies widely across our campus because each person has their own personal connections to its effects.

Complicating this diversity of individual realities, the denial of our collective reality persists among many people across the country, even as the summer of 2024 was officially the northern hemisphere’s hottest on record. Nevertheless, imagining and working towards a better, more sustainable reality is both possible and urgent.

With these contexts in mind, applicants for the Sustainability Writing Awards may consider the theme of realities from any angle, but may want to consider the following prompts:

• How has your climate reality evolved as you’ve come to UW–Madison from a Wisconsin suburb, or from several states away, or from across an ocean?
• Have you always been conscious of your climate reality, or has it been a recent realization — and if the latter, what catalyzed the shift?
• How are individual climate realities being distorted or made clearer, especially in an increasingly digital world with a polarized political landscape?
• How do you imagine your climate reality relative to others, and what does it mean to exist in one reality among a myriad of experiences and beliefs?
• How does the field of sustainability offer—or not offer—a means of changing the global climate reality?

Applicants are invited to submit nonfiction (personal essay, feature story, literary narratives, etc.) between 750 and 1,800 words by November 24 at 11:59 p.m. Any entry considering an aspect of the theme of realities in the context of climate change and/or sustainability will be accepted. If you are unfamiliar with short creative nonfiction, good places to familiarize yourself with the genre are previous winning essays, local and student literary journals, and the essays section of magazines and newspapers.

A total of $1500 in scholarship prizes will be awarded to three winners. Winning authors’ work will also be displayed on the Office of Sustainability website. In addition, prior to publication, the winning authors will work with an Office of Sustainability editor to polish pieces and gain editorial experience.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Nathan Jandl at njandl@wisc.edu