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.

Agymah Kamau

Pictures of a Dying Man

A Novel

As Isamina Belle confided later, when she stepped in her front door and saw her husband hanging from a rope tied to a joist, with his head bowed as if in prayer and his feet dangling inches from the floor, the first thing she did was to hasten and fling open all the windows in the house.

Tommy Pico

Nature Poem

My family’s experience isn’t fodder

for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs

But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?

Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game

Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil

Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company

and I am descended from a long line of wildfires

I mean tribal leaders

The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off

I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

Michael Byers

The Coast of Good Intentions

Stories

…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.

Jonathan Franzen

The Twenty-Seventh City

A Novel

The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.

Dan Josefson

That's Not A Feeling

A Novel

“This was when my dad was still living with us, but he would come to services from work, so when we went home afterward I’d have to choose who to go home with. I don’t know if it upset my dad, but I always went home with my mom. Mostly because she drove the Beetle, which was so much more fun. She would play these old Patti Smith cassettes, and I’d sing with her. But the best part was she’d let me put on the dome light, so it felt like we were in this little space capsule, just the two of us. That’s my favorite memory, me and my mom going home from temple Friday nights. That car was like a lit-up igloo rolling through the dark.”