Narratives of Grace and Presence: HDS Students Receive 2026 Buechner Prize

Harvard Divinity School (HDS) is pleased to announce that Ivy Wang, MDiv ’26, MPA ’26 (HKS), and Sally Wang, MDiv ’26, are the recipients of the 2026 Frederick Buechner Prize, awarded each year to graduating MDiv students whose senior papers best reflect the literary and theological imagination of the late writer and theologian Frederick Buechner.

This year’s winning papers reflect Buechner’s belief that storytelling can illuminate both the sacred and the deeply human. 

Storytelling, Memory, and Spiritual Accompaniment

Ivy Wang’s paper, “Storied Mothers: Reimagining Accompaniment Through Asian American Narrative,” explores devotional nonfiction as a mode of theological inquiry. Through stories centered on her mother and grandmother, Wang examines love, memory, and spiritual accompaniment while inviting readers to recognize the sacred in everyday relationships and experiences.

“I’m so surprised to receive this prize—and surprisingly moved,” Wang said. “I wrote where the energy was, the most true and tender parts, but the only way I could do it was by telling myself no one would read any of it. And so it feels like grace that these stories about my mother and grandmother have been recognized in this way.”

Wang said the project emerged from years of encouragement and mentorship at HDS. “I want to thank my thesis advisor, Teddy Hickman-Maynard, as well as Emma de Lisle, the best teaching fellow in the world,” she said. “I also want to thank HDS professors Stephanie Paulsell, Matthew Potts, and Regina Walton for giving me the space to explore my fledgling creative writing instincts in all their classes. This thesis truly would not exist without their years of encouragement, care, and love.”

Looking back on the work, Wang said she sought to connect theological ideas with her own family history and cultural experience. “What I’ve tried to do is to translate these big HDS concepts—to take the theories of spiritual accompaniment, the theologies of love and sacramentality, draw them into the particularities of my own Asian American stories, and then offer them back into the world,” she said.

Expanding the Imagination of Caregiving

Sally Wang’s paper, “Ghostly Matters and Reimagined Care: Haunting, Racialized Care, and Presence in a Safety-Net Hospital,” brings together ethnography and practical theology to explore how chaplains and spiritual caregivers respond to patients’ experiences of ghosts and spectral presences. Drawing from fieldwork conducted at Boston Medical Center, as well as the growing scholarly literature on “haunting,” Wang argues for a broader understanding of care within medical practice. 

“Harvard Divinity School has truly been a place where possibilities become realities for me, offering a space where I could think across disciplines, traditions, and forms of care in ways I had never imagined before,” Wang said. “This award feels meaningful not only as recognition of academic work, but also as recognition of the many lives and relationships that shaped the project itself.”

Wang credited mentors and research participants for shaping both the project and her approach to scholarship. “I am profoundly grateful to my advisor, Professor Swayam Bagaria, and my teaching fellow, Abtsam Saleh, for their generous mentorship and encouragement throughout the writing process,” she said. “I also feel deeply indebted to every person I encountered during my fieldwork at Boston Medical Center, especially those who entrusted me with their stories during critical moments shaped by illness, suffering, life, and death.”

Through its engagement with spirituality, medicine, and cultural understandings of presence, Wang’s work challenges caregivers to expand their imagination of healing and accompaniment.
 

Banner photo of Sally Wang, left, and Ivy Wang by Alex Bayer.