Nigerian writer Adams Adeosun has received a highly prestigious fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He will be the 2024-2025 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow and reside at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Since 1986, the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing has provided time, space, and an intellectual community for writers working on a first book of poetry or fiction, while developing their skills as instructors in one of North America’s top-ranked creative writing programs.

Adeosun distinguished themselves out of an applicant pool of nearly 800 emerging authors. They will receive a stipend of at least $40,000, and will join the faculty at UW-Madison in late August, for a nine-month appointment meant to provide the time, space, and collegial support to complete or revise a first or second creative book-length manuscript.

This is a prestigious fellowship that many African writers are beginning to be recognized for. Last year’s WICW fellows include Motswana writer Gothataone Moeng and Somali writer Sadia Hassan.

Adams Adeosun holds an MFA from the University of Iowa. They are a writer from Nigeria whose work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Transition, The Offing, Catapult, Isele, Limbe to Lagos: Nonfiction from Cameroon and Nigeria, and Rele Gallery’s Five Years of Young Contemporaries. Their poetry chapbook, If the Golden Hour Won’t Come For Us, is forthcoming from Akashic Books’ New-Generation African Poets box set. They are a 2024 MacDowell fellow.

If you are interested in applying to the fellowship program, applications for the 2025-2026 WICW Fellowships will re-open on November 1, 2024, with a deadline of January 1, 2025. Stay tuned!

Congrats to Adeosun!