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.

Tuxedo Junction
Essays on American Culture

It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.

Agatha of Little Neon: A Novel

We didn’t know much about addiction, about homelessness, but we knew how it could look. We’d watched a man nod into his own lap in the Tim Hortons on Abbott Street, had seen kids hawk lone red and white carnations in plastic sleeves to drivers on the interchange off-ramp. We’d heard the spellbound murmurs of the woman who sat all day at the bus shelter on Fillmore. We offered these people things we thought they’d want. Some days one said yes to a cheeseburger or a Filet-O-Fish or a hot coffee, and other days no one wanted anything but whatever coins and cash we had.

We were many times not helpful at all. One winter, Mary Lucille came across a man asleep next to the grocery carts in the Tops lot. She tapped him on the shoulder and asked, when he roused, if he wanted a ride to the shelter. He shook his head. Or, she said, she could take him to McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich, or fries, or a parfait. 

“A parfait?” the man said. He squinted at her. “What the hell is a parfait?” 

The Afterlife of Objects
Poems

Outside, my grandfather wheeling

a pesticide tank

 

from tree to tree, spraying everything

with thick, white foam –

 

bark, leaf, apple flesh –

salting the garden

 

with handfuls of red sand, dissolving

aphid, Japanese beetle, horned tomato worm

 

as thick as rope. Gone

in an instant, emerging

 

from his fiberglass outbuilding shed, helving

an axe, bright blade, pine handle,

 

to eliminate

a dwarf peach weakened by nesting beetles.

 

O ordinary axe

Hard Damage

To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue 
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music 
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum
the German word for dream

Monstrous Affections
An Anthology of Beastly Tales

The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.

In the Distance
A Novel

Often, the three of them—burro, horse, rider—would simply stand in the middle of the plains. Aside from the occasional sigh or the halfhearted attempt at swatting away an insect, they all stood still, staring into the avoid. Brown flats, blue wall. From his animals, with their serenely sad, bulge-eyed gaze, Håkan seemed to have learned to gape into space. To this absent expression, he added a drooping jaw. They merely stood, completely absorbed by nothing. Time dissolved into the sky. There was little difference between landscape and spectators. Insensible things that existed in one another.

Tuxedo Junction
Essays on American Culture

It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.

Agatha of Little Neon: A Novel

We didn’t know much about addiction, about homelessness, but we knew how it could look. We’d watched a man nod into his own lap in the Tim Hortons on Abbott Street, had seen kids hawk lone red and white carnations in plastic sleeves to drivers on the interchange off-ramp. We’d heard the spellbound murmurs of the woman who sat all day at the bus shelter on Fillmore. We offered these people things we thought they’d want. Some days one said yes to a cheeseburger or a Filet-O-Fish or a hot coffee, and other days no one wanted anything but whatever coins and cash we had.

We were many times not helpful at all. One winter, Mary Lucille came across a man asleep next to the grocery carts in the Tops lot. She tapped him on the shoulder and asked, when he roused, if he wanted a ride to the shelter. He shook his head. Or, she said, she could take him to McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich, or fries, or a parfait. 

“A parfait?” the man said. He squinted at her. “What the hell is a parfait?” 

The Afterlife of Objects
Poems

Outside, my grandfather wheeling

a pesticide tank

 

from tree to tree, spraying everything

with thick, white foam –

 

bark, leaf, apple flesh –

salting the garden

 

with handfuls of red sand, dissolving

aphid, Japanese beetle, horned tomato worm

 

as thick as rope. Gone

in an instant, emerging

 

from his fiberglass outbuilding shed, helving

an axe, bright blade, pine handle,

 

to eliminate

a dwarf peach weakened by nesting beetles.

 

O ordinary axe

Hard Damage

To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue 
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music 
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum
the German word for dream

Monstrous Affections
An Anthology of Beastly Tales

The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.

In the Distance
A Novel

Often, the three of them—burro, horse, rider—would simply stand in the middle of the plains. Aside from the occasional sigh or the halfhearted attempt at swatting away an insect, they all stood still, staring into the avoid. Brown flats, blue wall. From his animals, with their serenely sad, bulge-eyed gaze, Håkan seemed to have learned to gape into space. To this absent expression, he added a drooping jaw. They merely stood, completely absorbed by nothing. Time dissolved into the sky. There was little difference between landscape and spectators. Insensible things that existed in one another.