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.
…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.
In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
Javier was crazy about tacos. He loved them the way some men love their women: a nice, hard, firm shell. While many men have fallen to the wayside on account of a woman, it is hard to imagine a taco unraveling a man the way it did Javier. After simple surgery to remove a cyst from his gallbladder, one of Javier’s friends snuck him a couple of hard-shelled tacos. He propped himself up in his bed, the green of his hospital pajamas matching the lettuce in his taco, smiled wide, and dug in. After a good meal, he thanked the Lord for his many blessings, including such good friends, then laid himself down to sleep never to wake again. The taco shell had ripped his stitches as it went down.
Jilly took her head out of the oven mainly because it was hot and the gas did not work independently of the pilot light. Stupid new technology. And preferring her head whole and her new auburn sew-in weave unsinged, and having no chloroform in the house, she conceded that she would not go out like a poet. But she updated her status, just the same:
A final peace out
before I end it all.
Treat your life like bread,
no edge too small
to butter.
Jilly was not a poet or even an aspiring one. She just liked varying her posts as much as possible.
Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
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.
I do not know how I need the air,
or if it needs me. The lost air,
the air which is smashed, like a red hat.
When the sun rises the amnesty
of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,
the maroon horses - when the sun rises
the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard
with a thumb on top.
…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.
In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
Javier was crazy about tacos. He loved them the way some men love their women: a nice, hard, firm shell. While many men have fallen to the wayside on account of a woman, it is hard to imagine a taco unraveling a man the way it did Javier. After simple surgery to remove a cyst from his gallbladder, one of Javier’s friends snuck him a couple of hard-shelled tacos. He propped himself up in his bed, the green of his hospital pajamas matching the lettuce in his taco, smiled wide, and dug in. After a good meal, he thanked the Lord for his many blessings, including such good friends, then laid himself down to sleep never to wake again. The taco shell had ripped his stitches as it went down.
Jilly took her head out of the oven mainly because it was hot and the gas did not work independently of the pilot light. Stupid new technology. And preferring her head whole and her new auburn sew-in weave unsinged, and having no chloroform in the house, she conceded that she would not go out like a poet. But she updated her status, just the same:
A final peace out
before I end it all.
Treat your life like bread,
no edge too small
to butter.
Jilly was not a poet or even an aspiring one. She just liked varying her posts as much as possible.
Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
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.
I do not know how I need the air,
or if it needs me. The lost air,
the air which is smashed, like a red hat.
When the sun rises the amnesty
of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,
the maroon horses - when the sun rises
the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard
with a thumb on top.