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.

Leaving Saturn
Poems

In that darkness,

Speakers rose like

Housing projects,

Moonlight diamonded

Mesh-wire panes.

 

What was it that bloomed

Around his curled

Body when the lights

Came up, fluorescent,

Vacant, garish?

 

The gym throbbed

With beats & rage

And his eyes darted

Like a man nailed

To a burning crucifix.

Stop Breakin Down
Stories

Each pub has a barrel-rolling team. That makes ten teams. You wear fireproof gloves. The barrel is full of flaming tar. You have to see how long you can keep the barrel up in the air. It works like a relay. Four people on the team. You pass it to the next bloke when you get too hot and the barrel gets too heavy. You hold it high up above you and in your hands you rotate it; the flames shoot out into the crowd as you run down the streets. The people compact into themselves. You shout and the people duck down and run back and climb over each other and the flames shoot out at them and you laugh at the manic growls of fear and panic. There haven’t been more than a few deaths.

John Dollar
A Novel

When he’d gone they’d kept each other’s ring. Charlotte wore his on a thread between her breasts, she was stunned to find he hadn’t died with her ring somewhere on him. Now she had them both when even one was one too many. Sometimes she put them in her mouth. She put them on her tongue, one inside the other. She bit down on them. Sometimes she smoothed the paper of the letters that he’d written like shrouds over her face as she lay still. Sometimes she tried to hear his voice. She missed his face. She longed to know what it was doing. She held his shaving brush, she tried to touch her stomach with it but she couldn’t feel a thing beyond the cold. She tried to keep the locker closed so it would hold his smell but then she longed to hide herself away inside it. She couldn’t see his face.

Alligator Dance
Stories

Shortly after Halloween, Ruthie Wittenberg, round-faced, black bangs clasped at her temples by blue plastic My Merry barrettes I coveted, the only girl in the class shorter than I, befriended me. From Ruthie I learned many things: how to fold the Land O’Lakes butter box so the Indian girl’s knees turned into boobies (Ruthie’s word; I didn’t admit to mine), the naughty version of the Bosco song. I learned why there were no Polish people in our school or in our neighborhood, though Milwaukee was full of them. They had to live, Ruthie told me, south of the Kinnickkinnick River, in basements. “Because they never wash,” Ruthie explained. They used their bathtubs for storing coal. They farted all the time from the odd food they ate: dogs, Ruthie said, among other things. I nodded. Back in Oklahoma we had Indians, pretty much the same. When I asked how you could tell if somebody was Polish, Ruthie said, “You’ll know it when you smell one.”

Last Night and the Night Before

REGGIE
Now see you gonna laugh. Cause you thank everythang I do is funny. It ain’t funny. It’s meant tah teach ya. How I speak? That’s meant tah teach you too. You get older ‘n leave this place...one thing ya gonna remember is the music of ya daddy’s voice. The memory ‘a what made ya. How ya people survived. An’ these little games we play? These little hand games? That’s your history too… ‘cause ya grandmama sat ya mama down when she was smaller ‘n you ‘n they played these games ‘n had the best time that ever was. Then, ya mama taught me ya know that? Shoot, I ain’t wanna learn no little girl games. Imma man! (Laughs.) What I look like playin’ some little girl hand game! But, then we had you. And I taught you. That’s a road map. You ever get lost, you find ya way back home (points to his chest) from them. Understand? And one way or another... I’ll come get you.

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.

 
Leaving Saturn
Poems

In that darkness,

Speakers rose like

Housing projects,

Moonlight diamonded

Mesh-wire panes.

 

What was it that bloomed

Around his curled

Body when the lights

Came up, fluorescent,

Vacant, garish?

 

The gym throbbed

With beats & rage

And his eyes darted

Like a man nailed

To a burning crucifix.

Stop Breakin Down
Stories

Each pub has a barrel-rolling team. That makes ten teams. You wear fireproof gloves. The barrel is full of flaming tar. You have to see how long you can keep the barrel up in the air. It works like a relay. Four people on the team. You pass it to the next bloke when you get too hot and the barrel gets too heavy. You hold it high up above you and in your hands you rotate it; the flames shoot out into the crowd as you run down the streets. The people compact into themselves. You shout and the people duck down and run back and climb over each other and the flames shoot out at them and you laugh at the manic growls of fear and panic. There haven’t been more than a few deaths.

John Dollar
A Novel

When he’d gone they’d kept each other’s ring. Charlotte wore his on a thread between her breasts, she was stunned to find he hadn’t died with her ring somewhere on him. Now she had them both when even one was one too many. Sometimes she put them in her mouth. She put them on her tongue, one inside the other. She bit down on them. Sometimes she smoothed the paper of the letters that he’d written like shrouds over her face as she lay still. Sometimes she tried to hear his voice. She missed his face. She longed to know what it was doing. She held his shaving brush, she tried to touch her stomach with it but she couldn’t feel a thing beyond the cold. She tried to keep the locker closed so it would hold his smell but then she longed to hide herself away inside it. She couldn’t see his face.

Alligator Dance
Stories

Shortly after Halloween, Ruthie Wittenberg, round-faced, black bangs clasped at her temples by blue plastic My Merry barrettes I coveted, the only girl in the class shorter than I, befriended me. From Ruthie I learned many things: how to fold the Land O’Lakes butter box so the Indian girl’s knees turned into boobies (Ruthie’s word; I didn’t admit to mine), the naughty version of the Bosco song. I learned why there were no Polish people in our school or in our neighborhood, though Milwaukee was full of them. They had to live, Ruthie told me, south of the Kinnickkinnick River, in basements. “Because they never wash,” Ruthie explained. They used their bathtubs for storing coal. They farted all the time from the odd food they ate: dogs, Ruthie said, among other things. I nodded. Back in Oklahoma we had Indians, pretty much the same. When I asked how you could tell if somebody was Polish, Ruthie said, “You’ll know it when you smell one.”

Last Night and the Night Before

REGGIE
Now see you gonna laugh. Cause you thank everythang I do is funny. It ain’t funny. It’s meant tah teach ya. How I speak? That’s meant tah teach you too. You get older ‘n leave this place...one thing ya gonna remember is the music of ya daddy’s voice. The memory ‘a what made ya. How ya people survived. An’ these little games we play? These little hand games? That’s your history too… ‘cause ya grandmama sat ya mama down when she was smaller ‘n you ‘n they played these games ‘n had the best time that ever was. Then, ya mama taught me ya know that? Shoot, I ain’t wanna learn no little girl games. Imma man! (Laughs.) What I look like playin’ some little girl hand game! But, then we had you. And I taught you. That’s a road map. You ever get lost, you find ya way back home (points to his chest) from them. Understand? And one way or another... I’ll come get you.

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.