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.

Ten Seconds
A Novel

“Malcolm is dead,” Eddie kept hearing as he raced to the shop. As he got closer, he saw the flashing lights, and the siren that had been only an eerie, barely audible musical accompaniment to his thoughts began to register as belonging to an ambulance and not as being a regular plant alarm. He knew that he would not cry no matter how awful it was; he never cried. That was one thing he never had to worry about. If one of them had to be killed here, it was better that it was Malcolm—because if Eddie had been killed, Malcolm would have cried like a baby.

Punching Out
One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.

Insectopedia

With careless hands a child kills an ant. Flies are far trickier, though once caught, they have little chance. And, if darting birds don’t grab them first, butterflies die natural deaths; few people—collectors excepted—willfully still such tremulous beauty.

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.

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.

Invasive species

By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².

 

It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.

 

I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.

 

In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³

 

I note the absence of the word “Arab.”

 

Still, they do not sense us⁴.

Ten Seconds
A Novel

“Malcolm is dead,” Eddie kept hearing as he raced to the shop. As he got closer, he saw the flashing lights, and the siren that had been only an eerie, barely audible musical accompaniment to his thoughts began to register as belonging to an ambulance and not as being a regular plant alarm. He knew that he would not cry no matter how awful it was; he never cried. That was one thing he never had to worry about. If one of them had to be killed here, it was better that it was Malcolm—because if Eddie had been killed, Malcolm would have cried like a baby.

Punching Out
One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.

Insectopedia

With careless hands a child kills an ant. Flies are far trickier, though once caught, they have little chance. And, if darting birds don’t grab them first, butterflies die natural deaths; few people—collectors excepted—willfully still such tremulous beauty.

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.

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.

Invasive species

By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².

 

It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.

 

I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.

 

In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³

 

I note the absence of the word “Arab.”

 

Still, they do not sense us⁴.