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.

A Strange Loop

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?

The Museum of Unnatural Histories: Poems

 

 

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds

In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons.  They closed over the sky like an eyelid.

Beauty Before Comfort
The Story of an American Original

Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.

 

“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.

 

“Hush up, Jeannie.”

Vinegar Bone
Poems

He did it deliberately &

so when the police tracked him down he was

able to explain it so

clearly they had to

agree. Still, they hadn’t done it.

 

Anyway, he’d checked it out &

it was what they’d suspected,

women! – women just

opened & spilled, there was

nothing special in there after all.

Combing the Snakes from His Hair
Poems

Bristling outward

his sadism roots him deepest.

Some will hurt whomever they choose.

 

God-headed and radiant

            but shimmering little to offer.

Don’t build your bed of crisis

            or lie on the down of his ire.

A Strange Loop

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?

The Museum of Unnatural Histories: Poems

 

 

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds

In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons.  They closed over the sky like an eyelid.

Beauty Before Comfort
The Story of an American Original

Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.

 

“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.

 

“Hush up, Jeannie.”

Vinegar Bone
Poems

He did it deliberately &

so when the police tracked him down he was

able to explain it so

clearly they had to

agree. Still, they hadn’t done it.

 

Anyway, he’d checked it out &

it was what they’d suspected,

women! – women just

opened & spilled, there was

nothing special in there after all.

Combing the Snakes from His Hair
Poems

Bristling outward

his sadism roots him deepest.

Some will hurt whomever they choose.

 

God-headed and radiant

            but shimmering little to offer.

Don’t build your bed of crisis

            or lie on the down of his ire.