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.
Mamá, you left me. Papá, you left me.
Abuelos, I left you. Tías, I left you.
Cousins, I’m here. Cousins, I left you.
Tías, welcome. Abuelos, we’ll be back soon.
Mamá, let’s return. Papá ¿por qué?
Mamá, marry for papers. Papá, marry for papers.
Tías, abuelos, cousins, be careful.
I won’t marry for papers. I might marry for papers.
I won’t be back soon. I can’t vote anywhere,
I will etch visas on toilet paper and throw them from a lighthouse.
Our culture is based in the profundity things carry. We’re always trying to see the world the way our ancestors did—we feel less of a relationship to the natural world. There was a time when we dictated our beliefs and told ourselves what was real, or what was wrong or right. There weren’t any abstractions. We knew that our language came before the world.
so mama said no running, afraid
for me: shriveled lansones, sickly.
threat of skinned shins. cherry
glow of lola’s clove cigarettes,
smoke plumes sealing my throat.
or on my cheeks, plum rashes
blooming from playing in witchwillow.
these days, I don’t run much.
but I was only seven when I broke
a girl’s front teeth.
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…
Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.
This decision to wear his coat—like other stratagems of Mr. Shawn’s, like many of the procedures at the old New Yorker—might have been viewed by outside observers as quaint. But it was simply a solution to a practical problem. He was terrified of catching cold, because that might keep him from working. It might slow what always looked in him like the semisacred task of getting out the magazine each week in a form as close to perfect as he could make it. He was also phobic about self-service elevators, especially if they were full of strangers, people with emotional demands, or people with colds. I’ve never known anyone to match him in the imagination he brought to getting around some problem—to thinking things out. Working on his proofs at the Algonquin was simply the solution to that day’s dilemma: how to do his work, when he had to leave the office early because the fellow who operated the manual elevator was going off duty at three in the afternoon. (The elevator was the only own Shawn could ride serenely, and it had been expressly retained by the building’s management after the other elevators were automated.)
Mamá, you left me. Papá, you left me.
Abuelos, I left you. Tías, I left you.
Cousins, I’m here. Cousins, I left you.
Tías, welcome. Abuelos, we’ll be back soon.
Mamá, let’s return. Papá ¿por qué?
Mamá, marry for papers. Papá, marry for papers.
Tías, abuelos, cousins, be careful.
I won’t marry for papers. I might marry for papers.
I won’t be back soon. I can’t vote anywhere,
I will etch visas on toilet paper and throw them from a lighthouse.
Our culture is based in the profundity things carry. We’re always trying to see the world the way our ancestors did—we feel less of a relationship to the natural world. There was a time when we dictated our beliefs and told ourselves what was real, or what was wrong or right. There weren’t any abstractions. We knew that our language came before the world.
so mama said no running, afraid
for me: shriveled lansones, sickly.
threat of skinned shins. cherry
glow of lola’s clove cigarettes,
smoke plumes sealing my throat.
or on my cheeks, plum rashes
blooming from playing in witchwillow.
these days, I don’t run much.
but I was only seven when I broke
a girl’s front teeth.
The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…
Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.
This decision to wear his coat—like other stratagems of Mr. Shawn’s, like many of the procedures at the old New Yorker—might have been viewed by outside observers as quaint. But it was simply a solution to a practical problem. He was terrified of catching cold, because that might keep him from working. It might slow what always looked in him like the semisacred task of getting out the magazine each week in a form as close to perfect as he could make it. He was also phobic about self-service elevators, especially if they were full of strangers, people with emotional demands, or people with colds. I’ve never known anyone to match him in the imagination he brought to getting around some problem—to thinking things out. Working on his proofs at the Algonquin was simply the solution to that day’s dilemma: how to do his work, when he had to leave the office early because the fellow who operated the manual elevator was going off duty at three in the afternoon. (The elevator was the only own Shawn could ride serenely, and it had been expressly retained by the building’s management after the other elevators were automated.)