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.
After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.
At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”
In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book
of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,
which we sit down to look over,
my rather recognizes for certain only
the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,
Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:
“Your mother has breasts,”
the children would say as they passed,
and frothing with rage he would give chase
some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.
He could be cruel. I once saw him blow pepper in the cat’s face. He loathed that cat, a surly, untrainable tom found in the street. But he was fond of another creature we took in, an orphaned nestling sparrow. Against expectations, the bird survived and learned to fly. But, afraid that it would not know how to fend for itself outdoors, we decided to keep it. My father sometimes sat by its cage, watching the bird and cooing to it in Chinese. My mother was amused. “You see: He has more to say to that bird than to us!” The emperor and his nightingale, she called them. “The Chinese have always loved their birds.” (What none of us knew: At that very moment in China keeping pet birds had been prohibited as a bourgeois affectation, and sparrows were being exterminated as pests.)
Kenosha is hideous behind us, cloaked by this cloud that hangs
On the pigeons flushed out: the last exhalation of the auto assembly.
We wait at the base of the docks, and talk about the White Sox,
Not the Roman Empire. My father and I stare right at it, but talk baseball.
no one wants to admit it but you just
might end up one day in the wrong
place at the wrong time and some
evil shit rains down on you
and maybe you get
crippled or blind
or plain old
dead and
not one soul will give a good goddamn
because they can soothe them-
selves with a wrung out prayer
about wrong places and
wrong times, when
even as they’re
thinking that
they know
that everywhere is the wrong place
and every hour is the wrong hour
and that bad breaks don’t seek
you out; they’re always there
waiting to swing into action
like a traitor limb you
didn’t even know
you had
After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.
At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”
In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book
of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,
which we sit down to look over,
my rather recognizes for certain only
the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,
Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:
“Your mother has breasts,”
the children would say as they passed,
and frothing with rage he would give chase
some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.
He could be cruel. I once saw him blow pepper in the cat’s face. He loathed that cat, a surly, untrainable tom found in the street. But he was fond of another creature we took in, an orphaned nestling sparrow. Against expectations, the bird survived and learned to fly. But, afraid that it would not know how to fend for itself outdoors, we decided to keep it. My father sometimes sat by its cage, watching the bird and cooing to it in Chinese. My mother was amused. “You see: He has more to say to that bird than to us!” The emperor and his nightingale, she called them. “The Chinese have always loved their birds.” (What none of us knew: At that very moment in China keeping pet birds had been prohibited as a bourgeois affectation, and sparrows were being exterminated as pests.)
Kenosha is hideous behind us, cloaked by this cloud that hangs
On the pigeons flushed out: the last exhalation of the auto assembly.
We wait at the base of the docks, and talk about the White Sox,
Not the Roman Empire. My father and I stare right at it, but talk baseball.
no one wants to admit it but you just
might end up one day in the wrong
place at the wrong time and some
evil shit rains down on you
and maybe you get
crippled or blind
or plain old
dead and
not one soul will give a good goddamn
because they can soothe them-
selves with a wrung out prayer
about wrong places and
wrong times, when
even as they’re
thinking that
they know
that everywhere is the wrong place
and every hour is the wrong hour
and that bad breaks don’t seek
you out; they’re always there
waiting to swing into action
like a traitor limb you
didn’t even know
you had