Whiting Award Winners

Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

You Bright and Risen Angels
A Cartoon

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

We unyoke owl pellets from marrow

in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,

 

a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy

dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark

 

beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist

with my hand.

The Here and Now
A Novel

“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”

 

“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”

 

“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”

 

I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”

Vellum
Poems

There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:

                                                                        think of the knife

that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped

to the rooster’s varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.

 

Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.

A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan

of reform was The Future’s in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets

 

waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking

How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe,

The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,

 

shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows’ nests,

slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.

Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker’s, bayonetshiv.

The Pleasing Hour
A Novel

The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.

 

THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Exiles of Eden

A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?

The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”

Maybe I am the straw.

Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:

Bray, flay, array.

They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,

gray days, dismay.

I am recently reckless about making a display

of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.

Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home

by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”

You know I’m fraying and just watch it.

You don’t even try to braid me together.

You Bright and Risen Angels
A Cartoon

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

We unyoke owl pellets from marrow

in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,

 

a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy

dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark

 

beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist

with my hand.

The Here and Now
A Novel

“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”

 

“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”

 

“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”

 

I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”

Vellum
Poems

There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:

                                                                        think of the knife

that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped

to the rooster’s varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.

 

Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.

A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan

of reform was The Future’s in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets

 

waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking

How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe,

The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,

 

shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows’ nests,

slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.

Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker’s, bayonetshiv.

The Pleasing Hour
A Novel

The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.

 

THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Exiles of Eden

A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?

The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”

Maybe I am the straw.

Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:

Bray, flay, array.

They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,

gray days, dismay.

I am recently reckless about making a display

of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.

Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home

by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”

You know I’m fraying and just watch it.

You don’t even try to braid me together.