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.

7 Tattoos
A Memoir in the Flesh

I show Hanky Panky the design that I adapted from a photo in a book of Dayak art, and he has me take off my shirt and he sketches the design on my collarbone with a grease pencil. Then he calls over an assistant to shave my chest. Now, under other circumstances, this could be kind of a turn-on. But in Hanky Panky’s tattoo parlor it justs reminds me of the shaving I had to undergo before some surgery I once had in the groin region. That one, much to my initial disappointment, had been performed by a male nurse, although actually I did see the wisdom of having a man for the job at around the time he began to whisk the razor around my balls. “Hey, be careful. Please!” I begged. And my male nurse answered, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll handle ‘em like they were my own.”

The Right Hand of Sleep
A Novel

I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.

 

But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.

 

There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.

 

Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.

The Orchardist
A Novel

There were times when the girls knew where the man was in the orchard, and times they did not. These times they trod slowly and carefully, not that they thought he would harm them—not really—but it had become a kind of game. You might turn the corner into an orchard row and find him there, walking toward you or away, or maybe you saw his legs, his trunk, obscured in leaves.

Of Being Dispersed
Poems

Who can give           an account of occasions

 

Can     mechanized description so falter

 

Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline

 

Each to enable a series of seconds    breaking or burning

 

Can undo the work of a million years         of human love

 

if I curse you just right

Dear Blackbird,
Poems

Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon

in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon

slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth

while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &

Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.

The Dream of the Unified Field
Selected Poems 1974-1994

There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

        broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

        By now the talk had changed.

There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.

        And x where the mirror had been.

And x where the window had been.

       And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.

 

There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.

7 Tattoos
A Memoir in the Flesh

I show Hanky Panky the design that I adapted from a photo in a book of Dayak art, and he has me take off my shirt and he sketches the design on my collarbone with a grease pencil. Then he calls over an assistant to shave my chest. Now, under other circumstances, this could be kind of a turn-on. But in Hanky Panky’s tattoo parlor it justs reminds me of the shaving I had to undergo before some surgery I once had in the groin region. That one, much to my initial disappointment, had been performed by a male nurse, although actually I did see the wisdom of having a man for the job at around the time he began to whisk the razor around my balls. “Hey, be careful. Please!” I begged. And my male nurse answered, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll handle ‘em like they were my own.”

The Right Hand of Sleep
A Novel

I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.

 

But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.

 

There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.

 

Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.

The Orchardist
A Novel

There were times when the girls knew where the man was in the orchard, and times they did not. These times they trod slowly and carefully, not that they thought he would harm them—not really—but it had become a kind of game. You might turn the corner into an orchard row and find him there, walking toward you or away, or maybe you saw his legs, his trunk, obscured in leaves.

Of Being Dispersed
Poems

Who can give           an account of occasions

 

Can     mechanized description so falter

 

Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline

 

Each to enable a series of seconds    breaking or burning

 

Can undo the work of a million years         of human love

 

if I curse you just right

Dear Blackbird,
Poems

Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon

in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon

slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth

while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &

Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.

The Dream of the Unified Field
Selected Poems 1974-1994

There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

        broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

        By now the talk had changed.

There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.

        And x where the mirror had been.

And x where the window had been.

       And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.

 

There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.