After suffering a series of serious medical crises that year, Wong wrote for KQED: “What I’ve known in my bones during my entire 48 years on this planet is that nothing is certain, and that we must build a world that acknowledges our interdependence with one another so no one ever falls through the cracks … I know we can transform the world if we have the political and collective will to do so.”
Wong was the only 2024 fellow to hail from the Bay Area. Two other Californians made the list, however. Pasadena’s Joseph Parker, an evolutionary biologist working at the California Institute of Technology, and Juan Felipe Herrera, a poet, educator and writer based in Fresno.