A pair of writing fellows with the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing in the UW–Madison Department of English were selected to receive prestigious Whiting Awards for their fiction work.
Ada Zhang, the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow, and Gothataone Moeng, the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow, received their awards — and the $50,000 stipend that accompanies them — at a ceremony held Wednesday, April 10n New York City.
This year’s ceremony represented the 39th year of the New York-based Whiting Foundation supporting writers, editors and educators. The awards are designed to “recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners the chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.”
Moeng was honored for Call and Response, her series of nine short stories about women in the villages and cities of Moeng’s native Botswana.
“I am very interested in the inner lives of women — their ambitions, their secret desires, how they navigate their familial, platonic and romantic relationships living in the contemporary world but in a culture that is also still steeped in traditional customs,” says Moeng, who also spent time in Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program before coming to UW. “I wrote most of the stories during my MFA program and writers’ residencies here in the United States, and always struggled with the question of how to accurately depict the complexity of a culture that my peers in workshop did not know.”
Zhang was honored for The Sorrows of Others, a collection of short stories that delves into the loneliness and longings of characters young and old, set in China and the United States.
“The book is a record of the questions I asked throughout my twenties,” says Zhang, who graduated from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. “What makes a family? How does the self emerge? To whom do we owe love, and how do we give love freely? The biggest challenge I faced was just that I was young, to writing and life. My skills were never enough for my vision. I felt always just short of the story I was trying to tell.”
Moeng and Zhang are the eighth and ninth UW creative writing fellows to win a Whiting Award, according to Amy Quan Barry, UW–Madison’s Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English. Both winners will complete their UW fellowships at the end of the 2023–24 academic year, and both plan to use their award money to prepare for their next writing project.
“Being part of the UW Creative Writing Program has meant everything to me,” says Zhang. “Of course, I’m grateful for the time to write, especially since I’m at the beginning of a new project. I’m also deeply grateful to my colleagues in the department, who have been so supportive and fun.”
Moeng echoes that sentiment.
“I have had an instructive year of what it means to be a working writer and a teaching artist, and I have survived a midwestern winter,” she jokes.