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.
Go Ju go Ju go.
Lightskinned Rainbow
eclipsed Tick Tock,
his chocolate walk-partner.
Incestuous Pootchie and Tan.
Both Frogs. Squirrel. Crazy ass Sponge.
Bama Duke’s lopsided,
sticky daughter, Peaches.
Out b-shaped barber,
Blinky. We miss you,
Missy, rest in peace.
John Rocks-on-Rocks.
The Young Dillingers.
Freckles versus Baby Tim.
Cabalou stuttering,
i-m-m-mi-t-ta-ting Johnny Lips.
Hillbilly, Lefty, Itchy and Skip.
Dootie Bug’s first
baby’s mama, leaving.
Tootie had Fin.
As Frankel muses on Progress in his Hillman Minx, Ed Markowitz wearily drives a rented Fiat to the Oriental Institute. He had not wanted to go on the day of his arrival, but this is the only time he can be sure to see Mujahid Rashaf, who is returning to Saudi Arabia within the week. Rashaf is an Oxford fellow and the son of a merchant prince. He will provide just the reasoned yet religious opinions that Markowitz seeks for his book, Terrorism: A Civilized Creed.
She remembers sensing—almost smelling—that he wanted to kill her. Or that for a split second the thought was spreading itself in his mind. She remembers the terrible little theater of his eyes, which she had always thought to be blue. But looking at them in the afternoon glare, she saw that they weren’t even a little bit blue. They were grey.
Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.
Go Ju go Ju go.
Lightskinned Rainbow
eclipsed Tick Tock,
his chocolate walk-partner.
Incestuous Pootchie and Tan.
Both Frogs. Squirrel. Crazy ass Sponge.
Bama Duke’s lopsided,
sticky daughter, Peaches.
Out b-shaped barber,
Blinky. We miss you,
Missy, rest in peace.
John Rocks-on-Rocks.
The Young Dillingers.
Freckles versus Baby Tim.
Cabalou stuttering,
i-m-m-mi-t-ta-ting Johnny Lips.
Hillbilly, Lefty, Itchy and Skip.
Dootie Bug’s first
baby’s mama, leaving.
Tootie had Fin.
As Frankel muses on Progress in his Hillman Minx, Ed Markowitz wearily drives a rented Fiat to the Oriental Institute. He had not wanted to go on the day of his arrival, but this is the only time he can be sure to see Mujahid Rashaf, who is returning to Saudi Arabia within the week. Rashaf is an Oxford fellow and the son of a merchant prince. He will provide just the reasoned yet religious opinions that Markowitz seeks for his book, Terrorism: A Civilized Creed.
She remembers sensing—almost smelling—that he wanted to kill her. Or that for a split second the thought was spreading itself in his mind. She remembers the terrible little theater of his eyes, which she had always thought to be blue. But looking at them in the afternoon glare, she saw that they weren’t even a little bit blue. They were grey.
Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.