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.

The Bird Artist
A Novel

I think it was near one o’clock in the morning. Retching blood, Botho jerked his head back and forth, then lurched forward as though loosing his earthly form. This was followed by a sharp intake of breath, as though he was trying to suck it back in again. The bullet had lodged near his shoulder; it had not damaged his throat, and he could still utter, “I’ll pay the devil my soul twice over to watch you hang.” That sentence seemed to take an eternity to work its way through. I all but felt his grimace clamp down on my heart; blood bubbled along his lips.

Joan of Arkansas

Last year, Simone had been voted “Most Christ-Like” of the Domremy Catholic High School Freshman Class. 
            Privately, she hoped that she did have God’s grace to thank for her ease in the world. Something about grace, even though one need not do anything to receive it, denoted heroism. It was heroism in the sense of being singled out and chosen—an idea that accounted for and made tolerable the ways in which Simone felt entirely alone.
            Nothing, she knew, had been easy for Joan—nothing except talking to God. “If you want God to talk to you, you have to be silent,” Simone knew from one of Joan’s videos. She had attempted silence in every form she could fathom but even her attempts felt loud. How to empty herself of her self, she wondered.

The Revisionist
Poems

Unlike the other countries, this one

Begins in houses, specific houses and the upstairs room

Where constitutions vibrate in the blockfront drawers,

A Queen Anne highboy, or maybe the widow’s walk

On a farmhouse hundreds of miles inland and believed

By the family to be a lookout for Indians though clearly

It was a pioneer’s conceit, fresh as the latest politics

From home: so much for that innocent thesis The Frontier.

The Sirens of Mars
Searching for Life on Another World

The precision of the map allowed Maria to read the planet’s history like a type of braille. As hinted by the initial data, the northern hemisphere proved to be the smoothest surface that had ever been observed in the solar system. Most of the terrain seemed to tilt slightly to the north, suggesting that a planetwide drainage system may have once emptied there, into a great northern ocean. Inscribed onto the surface was even a possible shoreline, Deuteronilus, which could be traced for thousands of kilometers. The coast ran along nearly the same elevation, with variations that could be explained by the ground rebounding, exhaling as the weight of a sea of long-gone water evaporated. With each new detail Maria plotted, another aspect of Mars’s history came to life. 
     Mars Global Surveyor changed what it meant to see a planet. If the old map of Mars was a simple picture, the new map was a portrait. It went beyond what our eyes could take in, capturing data on contours, on composition, on forces we could not see—not just topography but things like magnetic signals and mineral compositions measured out beyond the visible wavelengths. There were subtleties to be seen—we just had to get there, and when we got there, we had to know how to look.

 

Excerpt(s) from The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson, copyright © 2020 by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Public Obscenities
A Play

CHOTON

I’m just saying like taxonomically, does it even make sense to categorize my genitalia and your genitalia as the same thing, like…

He indicates RAHEEM’s penis.

…if that’s a penis then…

He pulls his boxers down to show his own penis.

I mean what is this? It’s a polyp.

 

RAHEEM

Okay.

 

CHOTON

It’s a little nunu.

 

RAHEEM

Well I like your little nunu…

 

RAHEEM examines CHOTON’s penis. He pulls back his foreskin just a bit. CHOTON winces.

 

CHOTON

Ow. Careful.

 

RAHEEM

What?

 

CHOTON

No it’s— it’s just sensitive.

Volt
Stories

He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.

The Bird Artist
A Novel

I think it was near one o’clock in the morning. Retching blood, Botho jerked his head back and forth, then lurched forward as though loosing his earthly form. This was followed by a sharp intake of breath, as though he was trying to suck it back in again. The bullet had lodged near his shoulder; it had not damaged his throat, and he could still utter, “I’ll pay the devil my soul twice over to watch you hang.” That sentence seemed to take an eternity to work its way through. I all but felt his grimace clamp down on my heart; blood bubbled along his lips.

Joan of Arkansas

Last year, Simone had been voted “Most Christ-Like” of the Domremy Catholic High School Freshman Class. 
            Privately, she hoped that she did have God’s grace to thank for her ease in the world. Something about grace, even though one need not do anything to receive it, denoted heroism. It was heroism in the sense of being singled out and chosen—an idea that accounted for and made tolerable the ways in which Simone felt entirely alone.
            Nothing, she knew, had been easy for Joan—nothing except talking to God. “If you want God to talk to you, you have to be silent,” Simone knew from one of Joan’s videos. She had attempted silence in every form she could fathom but even her attempts felt loud. How to empty herself of her self, she wondered.

The Revisionist
Poems

Unlike the other countries, this one

Begins in houses, specific houses and the upstairs room

Where constitutions vibrate in the blockfront drawers,

A Queen Anne highboy, or maybe the widow’s walk

On a farmhouse hundreds of miles inland and believed

By the family to be a lookout for Indians though clearly

It was a pioneer’s conceit, fresh as the latest politics

From home: so much for that innocent thesis The Frontier.

The Sirens of Mars
Searching for Life on Another World

The precision of the map allowed Maria to read the planet’s history like a type of braille. As hinted by the initial data, the northern hemisphere proved to be the smoothest surface that had ever been observed in the solar system. Most of the terrain seemed to tilt slightly to the north, suggesting that a planetwide drainage system may have once emptied there, into a great northern ocean. Inscribed onto the surface was even a possible shoreline, Deuteronilus, which could be traced for thousands of kilometers. The coast ran along nearly the same elevation, with variations that could be explained by the ground rebounding, exhaling as the weight of a sea of long-gone water evaporated. With each new detail Maria plotted, another aspect of Mars’s history came to life. 
     Mars Global Surveyor changed what it meant to see a planet. If the old map of Mars was a simple picture, the new map was a portrait. It went beyond what our eyes could take in, capturing data on contours, on composition, on forces we could not see—not just topography but things like magnetic signals and mineral compositions measured out beyond the visible wavelengths. There were subtleties to be seen—we just had to get there, and when we got there, we had to know how to look.

 

Excerpt(s) from The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson, copyright © 2020 by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Public Obscenities
A Play

CHOTON

I’m just saying like taxonomically, does it even make sense to categorize my genitalia and your genitalia as the same thing, like…

He indicates RAHEEM’s penis.

…if that’s a penis then…

He pulls his boxers down to show his own penis.

I mean what is this? It’s a polyp.

 

RAHEEM

Okay.

 

CHOTON

It’s a little nunu.

 

RAHEEM

Well I like your little nunu…

 

RAHEEM examines CHOTON’s penis. He pulls back his foreskin just a bit. CHOTON winces.

 

CHOTON

Ow. Careful.

 

RAHEEM

What?

 

CHOTON

No it’s— it’s just sensitive.

Volt
Stories

He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.