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.
THOUGHT #3
Tyler Perry knows how to bring everything together wit all the stories? And all the singing? And all the different people talking?
THOUGHT #1
And Tyler Perry don’t never forget to bring in the spirit’ch’alities.
THOUGHT #2
‘Cause Tyler Perry loves his Mama—
THOUGHT #6
And the Lord—
THOUGHT #1
So write a nice, clean Tyler Perry-like gospel play for your parents please?
Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,
brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot
where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,
and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –
the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,
a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.
As the icon passes on its route through the crowds, pilgrims struggle to get close enough to touch the pavilion, running their hands ardently over its sides. Women walk toward it on their knees. Hundreds of these pilgrims have waited all night in the courtyard of the church, hoping for dreams of the Virgin. Families who want a favor from the Virgin often designate a female member to come to Tinos and crawl to the church on her knees up the main street, while motorcycles and cars speed around her. The shots of the women performing this act make them look like amputees, as if the logic of this beseeching forces them to impersonate the disabled in order to be healed.
A week into our affair, Severo Marquez told me he had shot his own dog. He’d already told me about his crazy female cousin who locked herself into the bathroom every Sunday and pounded nails into her hands in bloody imitation of Christ, about the jars of ears he saw in Vietnam, and his dramatic escape from Cuba—swimming across Guantánamo Bay under fire, dragging a rowboat full of relatives to the safety of the American base. I’d also heard about his Mookie-dog, part beagle, part Doberman, so smart she could carry an envelope to Severo’s mother across a mile of Little Havana, or climb a tree to find Severo in a woman’s apartment. When he said he’d shot this unbelievable animal, his dearest friend, there was a crack in his voice through which I could see him doing it, and suddenly I wondered whether everything else I’d heard from Severo might also be the truth.
There is a strange world
in the changing of a light bulb,
the waxing of a bookshelf
I think I could grow by,
as into a dusty dream
in which each day layers
against one just past
and molds the one to come,
content as cabbage
drudging towards harvest.
This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.
I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.
My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.
Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.
She love rainin on parades.
THOUGHT #3
Tyler Perry knows how to bring everything together wit all the stories? And all the singing? And all the different people talking?
THOUGHT #1
And Tyler Perry don’t never forget to bring in the spirit’ch’alities.
THOUGHT #2
‘Cause Tyler Perry loves his Mama—
THOUGHT #6
And the Lord—
THOUGHT #1
So write a nice, clean Tyler Perry-like gospel play for your parents please?
Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,
brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot
where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,
and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –
the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,
a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.
As the icon passes on its route through the crowds, pilgrims struggle to get close enough to touch the pavilion, running their hands ardently over its sides. Women walk toward it on their knees. Hundreds of these pilgrims have waited all night in the courtyard of the church, hoping for dreams of the Virgin. Families who want a favor from the Virgin often designate a female member to come to Tinos and crawl to the church on her knees up the main street, while motorcycles and cars speed around her. The shots of the women performing this act make them look like amputees, as if the logic of this beseeching forces them to impersonate the disabled in order to be healed.
A week into our affair, Severo Marquez told me he had shot his own dog. He’d already told me about his crazy female cousin who locked herself into the bathroom every Sunday and pounded nails into her hands in bloody imitation of Christ, about the jars of ears he saw in Vietnam, and his dramatic escape from Cuba—swimming across Guantánamo Bay under fire, dragging a rowboat full of relatives to the safety of the American base. I’d also heard about his Mookie-dog, part beagle, part Doberman, so smart she could carry an envelope to Severo’s mother across a mile of Little Havana, or climb a tree to find Severo in a woman’s apartment. When he said he’d shot this unbelievable animal, his dearest friend, there was a crack in his voice through which I could see him doing it, and suddenly I wondered whether everything else I’d heard from Severo might also be the truth.
There is a strange world
in the changing of a light bulb,
the waxing of a bookshelf
I think I could grow by,
as into a dusty dream
in which each day layers
against one just past
and molds the one to come,
content as cabbage
drudging towards harvest.
This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.
I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.
My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.
Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.
She love rainin on parades.