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.
…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.
If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.
If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.
If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.
If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.
If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.
Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.
“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.
“Hush up, Jeannie.”
A grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.
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…
A planeload of insurance salesmen, blown off course,
Discovers a tribe who believe an elephant-
In-the-distance is the same size as a gnat-in-the-eye.
This should cause trouble in a hunt. But tribespeople
Merely flick the pesky trumpeter away,
While the gnat – felled by clouds of arrows – feeds
The tribe for weeks. Faced by a lion, tribesmen run
Until its head is small enough to squish. Muscular
Warriors are found dead, pierced by mosquito-needles
Ear-to-ear. Everything here is as it seems.
The stick-in-water, drawn out, remains crooked
As a boomerang. Mountain and molehill are identical.
Tragedies that crush Americans – love’s waterbed
Popping, parents dropped into the scalding pot of age-
Require only that the sufferer walk away. “It’s not so awful,”
Tribal healers say. “With every step, troubles shrink;
Their howling dwindles to a buzz; their fangs shrivel to the size
Of pollen grains. Reach out. Brush them away. You see?”
…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.
If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.
If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.
If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.
If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.
If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.
Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.
“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.
“Hush up, Jeannie.”
A grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.
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…
A planeload of insurance salesmen, blown off course,
Discovers a tribe who believe an elephant-
In-the-distance is the same size as a gnat-in-the-eye.
This should cause trouble in a hunt. But tribespeople
Merely flick the pesky trumpeter away,
While the gnat – felled by clouds of arrows – feeds
The tribe for weeks. Faced by a lion, tribesmen run
Until its head is small enough to squish. Muscular
Warriors are found dead, pierced by mosquito-needles
Ear-to-ear. Everything here is as it seems.
The stick-in-water, drawn out, remains crooked
As a boomerang. Mountain and molehill are identical.
Tragedies that crush Americans – love’s waterbed
Popping, parents dropped into the scalding pot of age-
Require only that the sufferer walk away. “It’s not so awful,”
Tribal healers say. “With every step, troubles shrink;
Their howling dwindles to a buzz; their fangs shrivel to the size
Of pollen grains. Reach out. Brush them away. You see?”