UW Creative Writing Awards Ceremony

media release: Madison writers! Please come to the third floor of the downtown Madison Public Library tonight at 7pm, to celebrate the winners of our annual UW-Madison Creative Writing Awards ceremony. UW alumna Jessica Tanck will kick off the event, with a reading from her debut poetry collection Winter Here.

Awardees are not told what prizes they've won before the ceremony, so if you entered this year's contests, please attend!

Featured author: JESSICA TANCK is the author of Winter Here (UGA Press, 2024), winner of the 2022 Georgia Poetry Prize. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s MFA program, Jess grew up in Sheboygan, WI, on the shores of Lake Michigan, and received her BA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, Meridian, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, and others. A recipient of the Vice Presidential Fellowship, Jess lives and writes in Salt Lake City, where she is a Ph.D. student in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She served as the 2022-2023 Editor of Quarterly West.

This Year's Awards

Awards for Undergraduate Students of ENGL 207: “Intro to Fiction & Poetry”

The Charles M. Hart, Jr. Writers of Promise Awards are given for the best poetry and fiction by students enrolled in ENGL 207: Intro to Fiction & Poetry. Students taking English 207 in either semester of the academic year may submit one story or three poems. These awards were established by Mrs. Janet Hart in honor of her son Charles, a creative writing student who passed away in 1992. Charles won an honorable mention in the George B. Hill poetry prize the year before he passed away, and so the award is meant to encourage emerging writers from the introductory poetry and fiction workshops

Undergraduate Poetry Awards

The Program in Creative Writing accepts entries to the Phillip H. Wang Memorial Prizes in Poetry ($500-$1,000) and the George B. Hill Poetry Awards ($50-$400) as a single submission. Read more about each award, below.

The Phillip H. Wang Memorial Prize in Poetry ($1,000 winner, $500 runner up) is awarded to the best collection of three poems written by any undergraduate student at UW-Madison, submitted in a campus-wide competition. Since Phillip was a spoken-word artist, special consideration may be given to students who submit audio files of their poems in addition to the required pdf submissions. Interested applicants can read and hear a sampling of Phillip's poems, by clicking this link.

The George B. Hill Poetry Awards ($50-$400) were established in 1951 by Theodore Stempfel, president of Brach's Candy Company, to honor Stempfel’s college friend George. In addition to being a writer for The Daily Cardinal, Mr. Hill was also a poet, so the George B. Hill Awards were established to honor his legacy.

Undergraduate Fiction Awards

The Program in Creative Writing accepts entries to the Henry Douglas Mackaman Undergraduate Writer’s Award ($1,000) and the Therese Muller Memorial Fiction Awards ($50-$500) as a single submission. Read more about each award, below.

The Henry Douglas Mackaman Undergraduate Writer’s Award ($1,000) was established in 2015. The prize is awarded to the best short story written by a sophomore, junior, or senior, submitted in a campus-wide competition. Read more about Henry Douglas Mackaman's legacy at henrymackaman.com.

The Therese Muller Memorial Fiction Awards ($50-$500) were established in 1951 by UW alumna and favorite daughter of Sauk City, Therese Muller, who graduated from UW in 1912. They are given to short stories of particular promise, written by any UW-Madison undergraduate.

Undergraduate & Graduate Nonfiction Awards

The Program in Creative Writing awards promising writers of creative nonfiction through two separate competitions. The Therese Muller Memorial Nonfiction Awards ($50-$500) are open to any UW-Madison undergraduate student, for any genre of creative nonfiction. The Johanna Garfield Award in Nonfiction Creative Writing ($2,500) is given to the best creative personal essay written by any undergraduate student or graduate student currently enrolled at UW-Madison. Read more about each award and find the submission links, below.

The Johanna Garfield Award in Nonfiction Creative Writing ($2,500) was established in 2020, and is open to any current undergraduate or graduate student at UW-Madison who submits a work of creative nonfiction that could be described as a "personal essay," meaning an essay based primarily on the author's lived experience. This prize honors the late Johanna Garfield, whose articles and essays appear in The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Paris Review, Newsday, Ms., and many other prestigious publications.

The Therese Muller Memorial Nonfiction Awards ($50-$500) are open to any current UW-Madison undergraduate student who submits an essay in any sub-genre of creative nonfiction (personal essay, memoir, lyric essay, travel writing, creative journalism, etc, etc.) Graduate students are not eligible for these awards. The prizes are named for UW alumna and favorite daughter of Sauk City, Therese Muller, who graduated from UW in 1912.

Undergraduate Thesis Prizes

The Program in Creative Writing awards at least three annual prizes of $1,000 or more, for students who have completed ENGL 695 during the current academic year: one for poetry, one for fiction, and one for any genre. Read more about the individual prizes, below.

The Ron Wallace Poetry Thesis Prize ($1,000) is awarded annually for the best poetry thesis completed during the current academic year by an English Major with an Emphasis in Creative Writing. The prize was established by Professor Emeritus Ronald Wallace, author of 12 books and founder of UW’s Program in Creative Writing, who retired in 2015.

The Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Prize ($1,000) is awarded annually for the best fiction thesis completed by an English Major with an Emphasis in Creative Writing. Eudora Welty graduated from UW-Madison in 1929, and over the course of her writing career she received a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Nobel Prize nomination, and many other honors.

The Cy Howard Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing ($1,000) is awarded annually to an English Major with an Emphasis in Creative Writing, for a thesis written in any genre of creative writing. This award was established by Mrs. Barbara Howard in honor of her husband Cy, who was a graduate of UW-Madison and a writer for film and television.

Graduate Fiction & Poetry Prizes

The Program in Creative Writing awards two $1,500 prizes—one in fiction and one in poetry—for the best entries by University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate Students.

The August Derleth Prize ($1,500) will be awarded in poetry this year. The award is named for one of Wisconsin’s most prolific and beloved authors, August Derleth, who wrote literally hundreds of books—this prize goes to “students demonstrating special interest in Wisconsin regional literature, or one of the other writing genres to which August Derleth contributed.”

The William W. Marr Graduate Scholarship Prize in Creative Writing ($1,500) will be awarded in fiction this year. This prize was established in 2018 by the family of UW alumnus William W. Marr, who was both a nuclear engineer and an internationally renowned poet, writer, and artist. Also known as Fei Ma, Dr. Marr has published 21 volumes of poetry, 3 books of essays, and several books of translation of contemporary North American and European poetry in Asia. His poems appear in over 100 anthologies, and are included in high school and college textbooks in Taiwan, China, England, and Germany.

Scholarship Eligibility

PLEASE NOTE: By University policy, all creative writing prizes must be processed as scholarship disbursements, rather than as honoraria or other income. For this reason, if an applicant has already reached their University-, State-, or Federally-mandated financial support limits for the year, then they may receive their award in name only (i.e. they will be named and listed as a winner, but their total scholarship support for the semester will not change; they won’t receive additional prize money). This unfortunate situation will only be encountered by applicants who receive large sums of scholarship aid or other financial support. Often it does not affect any of our winners, but it has affected as many as two or three winners, in some years.