The UW–Madison Sustainability Writing Awards, hosted by the Office of Sustainability, are intended to inspire conversations about how writing can bring together people with different experiences to reflect and act within the context of the global climate crisis.
2024 Sustainability Writing Awards
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 (see below), 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.
“A Rusty Resolution”
By Madelyn Anderson
Madelyn Anderson (they/she) is a second-year undergraduate double majoring in Science Communication and Environmental Studies. They combine these passions outside of the classroom by serving as science editor at The Daily Cardinal, volunteering at local farms, and working towards environmental equity at the Climate Solutions for Health Lab. In their free time, they enjoy creating eco-art, and they hope to continue communicating about environmental issues through multiple mediums after graduation.
Bird, Tree, and Me: Resolutions for the Climate Crisis
By Scott Hershberger
Scott Hershberger (he/him) is a second-year M.S. student in Life Sciences Communication. For his thesis, he is researching how Wisconsin Extension professionals approach climate change conversations with communities across the state. He is also a project assistant with the Wisconsin Extension Maple Syrup Program, where he researches the social science of maple syrup production and created a climate change adaptation menu for Midwestern maple syrup producers. Previously, he was a science writer at Scientific American, Fermilab, and the American Mathematical Society. After graduating, he aims to work in communications to advance local climate solutions. Website.
“Her historic snowfall: when will it be the last in her lifetime?”
By Hailey Sewell
Hailey Sewell (she/her) is a third-year undergraduate majoring in English (Creative Writing) and Environmental Studies with a certificate in Sustainability. She is currently working alongside the Office of Sustainability and the Lakeshore Preserve in developing programs to connect students and staff to the natural environment around campus to benefit mental health. Hailey is also hoping to get more involved with the ASM Sustainability Committee’s education campaign, which is fighting for a mandatory sustainability course for incoming students. After college, she strives to inspire change through her art about global climate injustices and the need for rapid environmental policy.
Scroll down to read about the theme for 2022.
“Resilience in the archive; Or, reflections on a 100-year-old lollipop”
By Andrew McDonnell
Andrew McDonnell is a graduate student entering his final semester in the Library and Information Science program with a concentration in Archives in a Digital Age. He is also the PA Librarian in the Journalism Reading Room and directs the archives and a media studies program at Wayland Academy. He has authored two novels, All Animals Vs. All Humans and November 123, and his shorter writing has appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio, Notre Dame Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and A Prairie Home Companion. Beyond the iSchool, he hopes to help connect students, scholars, and the public to great physical and digital collections.
“The resilience of mallards, and us”
By Allyson Mills
Allyson Mills is a senior majoring in English and Music Performance, with certificates in Environmental Studies, European Studies, and Leadership. Outside of class, she works as the Advancement Programs intern at the Wisconsin Foundation & Alumni Association. After graduation, she hopes to attend graduate school in Civil Society and Community Research and Environment and Resources. After college, she dreams of working for a nonprofit or in a higher education institution.
“‘Humans have arrived at the Mekong River’: The story of my grandmother and our future”
By Ben Yang
Benjamin Yang is a fourth-year undergraduate studying Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is the president of Engineers for a Sustainable World, an organization dedicated to providing hands-on sustainability projects and initiatives on campus, as well as a student intern at the Office of Sustainability, where he works on the Social Sustainability Coalition Team and Food Sustainability Working Group. He also does research for the Morgridge Center for Public Service to create a closed loop farming system for youth to grow their own strawberries.
2022 Awards Description
Our understanding of climate change, and how to subdue it, begins with the numbers and molecules of science. It also begins with things: electric grids, farms, giant steel windmills, oil rigs, smog, petroleum, melting glaciers, fires, and floods. But what about words? What can mere drops of ink, mere pixels, do against the sixth extinction, against the drought and fires and floods? Equations, methods, charts, large immovable objects—and words?
The inaugural UW–Madison Sustainability Writing Awards started with a simple premise: in the ongoing climate crisis, writing can inspire us, bring us together, and catalyze us to act. Thanks to the generosity of donors, the Office of Sustainability offered three $200 scholarships to undergraduate, graduate, and professional students who submitted essays on the topic of resilience. The topic drew a range of writing about resilience from ecological, personal, political, educational, and technological perspectives.
In his essay on the archive, Andrew McDonnell writes of how our resilience—in the smallest, most unexpected ways—makes us “agents of history.” He shows how archives preserve resilience both good and bad, and asks, “What will I leave behind? … How can I leave less behind?” Ben Yang considers how we leave behind legacies through the story of his Hmong grandmother, who survived persecution, fled to the United States, and collected plastic caps, soda cans, and prayers to build a future for herself and her family. Yang’s grandmother demonstrates how “resiliency is the quality of immersing oneself in a tedium that strives for change,” and Yang insists that her story can help us find passion, and endurance, in the continued and the everyday. Allyson Mills looks to the natural world to better see ourselves, as she identifies resilience in mallards she watches endure a storm at a pier on Lake Mendota. She incorporates research on how they cooperate and survive to suggest that their story might be ours, too, if we can learn to adapt, to “protect one another, and work to save our future.”
This year’s winning essays appeal for words in our climate crisis. Language is resilient: information and stories persist through centuries because of recorded syllables carrying hope, dreams, despair, and memories of what seemed to last forever. The winning writers show that words can bring us into confrontation with the pain and errors of the present and past—and maybe, also, allow us to imagine a different future.