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.

Rose
Poems

Ivy ties the cellar door

in autumn, in summer morning glory

wraps the ribs of a mouse.

Love binds me to the one

whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,

whose sleeping head I kiss,

wondering is it death?

beauty? this dark

star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head.

 

My love’s hair is autumn hair, there

the sun ripens.

My fingers harvest the dark

vegetable of her body.

In the morning I remove it

from my tongue and

sleep again.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Stories

Several times a day Granny Lin bathes Old Tang: in the morning and before bedtime, and whenever he wets or dirties himself. The private bathroom is what Granny Lin likes best about her marriage. For all her life, she has used public bathrooms, fighting with other slippery bodies for the lukewarm water drizzling from the rusty showers. Now that she has a bathroom all to herself, she never misses any chance to use it.

Autobiography of a Face
A Memoir

I stood there perfectly still, just as I had sat for countless medical photographs: full face, turn to the left, the right, now a three-quarter shot to the left. I took a certain pride in knowing the routine so well. I’ve even seen some of these medical photographs in publications. Curiously, those sterile, bright photos are easy for me to look at. For one thing, I know that only doctors look at them, and perhaps I’m even slightly proud that I’m such an interesting case, worthy of documentation. Or maybe I do not really think it is me sitting there, Case 3, figure 6-A.

The Solace of Open Spaces
Essays

It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep—sheltered from wind. A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hailstone has hit me on the head. I’m trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands, a fifty-mile trip that takes five days because sheep shade up in hot sun and won’t budge until it’s cool.  Bunched together now, and excited into a run by the storm, they drift across dry land, tumbling into draws like water and surge out again onto the rugged, choppy plateaus that are the building blocks of this state.

Wild Goose Dreams
A Play

​​

CHORUS

-   Search: Husband affair asset division.

-   Askkorealaw dot com Q and A

- Q. My dirty husband is sexing with our daughter’s tutor. Will I get rich if I divorce him or should I make him suffer?

-   A. Make him suffer.

 

MINSUNG

Although, my wife and daughter live in America, I don’t think they’d know if I lit myself on fire,

how will they know that I’m having an affair?

That was a joke.

They call us the goose fathers, I could look that up for you.

 

CHORUS

-   Search: Goose father origin

-   Wikipedia Korea

 

MINSUNG

Aha.

 

CHORUS

-   The goose father is a Korean man who works in Korea while his wife and children stay in an English-speaking country for the sake of the children’s education. / The term is

 

MINSUNG

The term is inspired by the fact that geese migrate, just as the goose dad must travel a great distance to see his family.

Wedding Day
Poems

Six monarch butterfly cocoons

            Clinging to the back of your throat –

 

            you could feel their gold wings trembling.

 

You were alarmed. You felt infested.

In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,

            gagging to spit them out –

                        and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t

Rose
Poems

Ivy ties the cellar door

in autumn, in summer morning glory

wraps the ribs of a mouse.

Love binds me to the one

whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,

whose sleeping head I kiss,

wondering is it death?

beauty? this dark

star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head.

 

My love’s hair is autumn hair, there

the sun ripens.

My fingers harvest the dark

vegetable of her body.

In the morning I remove it

from my tongue and

sleep again.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Stories

Several times a day Granny Lin bathes Old Tang: in the morning and before bedtime, and whenever he wets or dirties himself. The private bathroom is what Granny Lin likes best about her marriage. For all her life, she has used public bathrooms, fighting with other slippery bodies for the lukewarm water drizzling from the rusty showers. Now that she has a bathroom all to herself, she never misses any chance to use it.

Autobiography of a Face
A Memoir

I stood there perfectly still, just as I had sat for countless medical photographs: full face, turn to the left, the right, now a three-quarter shot to the left. I took a certain pride in knowing the routine so well. I’ve even seen some of these medical photographs in publications. Curiously, those sterile, bright photos are easy for me to look at. For one thing, I know that only doctors look at them, and perhaps I’m even slightly proud that I’m such an interesting case, worthy of documentation. Or maybe I do not really think it is me sitting there, Case 3, figure 6-A.

The Solace of Open Spaces
Essays

It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep—sheltered from wind. A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hailstone has hit me on the head. I’m trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands, a fifty-mile trip that takes five days because sheep shade up in hot sun and won’t budge until it’s cool.  Bunched together now, and excited into a run by the storm, they drift across dry land, tumbling into draws like water and surge out again onto the rugged, choppy plateaus that are the building blocks of this state.

Wild Goose Dreams
A Play

​​

CHORUS

-   Search: Husband affair asset division.

-   Askkorealaw dot com Q and A

- Q. My dirty husband is sexing with our daughter’s tutor. Will I get rich if I divorce him or should I make him suffer?

-   A. Make him suffer.

 

MINSUNG

Although, my wife and daughter live in America, I don’t think they’d know if I lit myself on fire,

how will they know that I’m having an affair?

That was a joke.

They call us the goose fathers, I could look that up for you.

 

CHORUS

-   Search: Goose father origin

-   Wikipedia Korea

 

MINSUNG

Aha.

 

CHORUS

-   The goose father is a Korean man who works in Korea while his wife and children stay in an English-speaking country for the sake of the children’s education. / The term is

 

MINSUNG

The term is inspired by the fact that geese migrate, just as the goose dad must travel a great distance to see his family.

Wedding Day
Poems

Six monarch butterfly cocoons

            Clinging to the back of your throat –

 

            you could feel their gold wings trembling.

 

You were alarmed. You felt infested.

In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,

            gagging to spit them out –

                        and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t