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 Constellation of Vital Phenomena
A Novel

At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.

What Runs Over

I imagine my daddy’s mind

looks most like broken
 

dryer machines

scattered in a forest,

 

field mice living

in the leftover lint.

 

I imagine it looks

like stepped-on

 

syringes, too,

flies stooping

 

down to sop up

all the sweet.

 
Exactly What Happened
Poems

And so with the last of my birthday cash

I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.

The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror

and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)

as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.

I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed

the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words

I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel

their cocks, cripple their families and pets.

 

The kit came and of course was crap.

Mary and O'Neil
A Novel in Stories

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.

Inheritance: Poems

If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.

 

If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.

 

If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.

 

If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.

 

If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.

WHITE
A Play

VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?

 

GUS: I’m sure I have.

 

VANESSA: I see.

 

GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.

 

VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!

 

GUS: That’s a new one.

 

VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?

 

GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.

 

VANESSA: I don’t.

 

GUS: I’m not a racist.

 

VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
A Novel

At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.

What Runs Over

I imagine my daddy’s mind

looks most like broken
 

dryer machines

scattered in a forest,

 

field mice living

in the leftover lint.

 

I imagine it looks

like stepped-on

 

syringes, too,

flies stooping

 

down to sop up

all the sweet.

 
Exactly What Happened
Poems

And so with the last of my birthday cash

I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.

The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror

and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)

as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.

I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed

the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words

I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel

their cocks, cripple their families and pets.

 

The kit came and of course was crap.

Mary and O'Neil
A Novel in Stories

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.

Inheritance: Poems

If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.

 

If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.

 

If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.

 

If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.

 

If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.

WHITE
A Play

VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?

 

GUS: I’m sure I have.

 

VANESSA: I see.

 

GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.

 

VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!

 

GUS: That’s a new one.

 

VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?

 

GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.

 

VANESSA: I don’t.

 

GUS: I’m not a racist.

 

VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.