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.
We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.
The hay rake’s rattle, the stunned sputter of a moccasin
Slung in the blades, the mid-gloam crickets sending
Their codes as though from a nearby country of dreamers.
Each sound found its shape – low drip into mud beneath
The leaking spigot, scrape of sparrows stowing twigs
In the eaves, the combines fading, unzipping the bean
Rows and back again, and the wind-combed drift
Of dust in the field, which is where I can hear it most
Clearly now, my pointing the direction away
From that town, saying there I am, there I am, there I am…
In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping
shower steam kept us invisible,
but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.
Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.
Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts
in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged
her ruler, and we printed the same confession
a hundred times, her shadow crossing
our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old
spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped
locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.
Heather gave birth so often she forgot,
she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost
in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye
in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.
Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,
how we strolled, arms linked, singing,
into the world of women where all deaths begin.
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.
You know it too! … The charm of funerals in the rain,
the special effects men with their hoses well aimed,
huge drops exploding on
classically beautiful
black umbrellas.
You know them, -
the houses like fat vegetables
stuffed with old lace, ceramics, silverware, dust –
secure as bank vaults.
Who will inherit?
Vittorio is dining with
that Chinese actress again…
Will the kingdom be divided?
Who will keep
the chandeliers in good repair
and tend the lists of public enemies?
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.
We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.
The hay rake’s rattle, the stunned sputter of a moccasin
Slung in the blades, the mid-gloam crickets sending
Their codes as though from a nearby country of dreamers.
Each sound found its shape – low drip into mud beneath
The leaking spigot, scrape of sparrows stowing twigs
In the eaves, the combines fading, unzipping the bean
Rows and back again, and the wind-combed drift
Of dust in the field, which is where I can hear it most
Clearly now, my pointing the direction away
From that town, saying there I am, there I am, there I am…
In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping
shower steam kept us invisible,
but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.
Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.
Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts
in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged
her ruler, and we printed the same confession
a hundred times, her shadow crossing
our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old
spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped
locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.
Heather gave birth so often she forgot,
she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost
in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye
in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.
Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,
how we strolled, arms linked, singing,
into the world of women where all deaths begin.
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.
You know it too! … The charm of funerals in the rain,
the special effects men with their hoses well aimed,
huge drops exploding on
classically beautiful
black umbrellas.
You know them, -
the houses like fat vegetables
stuffed with old lace, ceramics, silverware, dust –
secure as bank vaults.
Who will inherit?
Vittorio is dining with
that Chinese actress again…
Will the kingdom be divided?
Who will keep
the chandeliers in good repair
and tend the lists of public enemies?
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.