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.

Debt
Poems

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

 

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

 

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

 

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

 

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

Lucky Girls
Stories

“It was a misunderstanding,” her daughter said. “It was a cultural thing, actually.” And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, “He’s not a rapist.”

 

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if he raped you, he is a rapist.”

 

And Mandy said, “Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.”

Green Squall
Poems

           And the sky!

Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm

Of an empty nursery.

 

Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.

 

The grass was lizarding,

Green and on a rampage.

 

Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.

 

Noon. This noon –

Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.

The grass was lizarding

WHITE
A Play

VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?

 

GUS: I’m sure I have.

 

VANESSA: I see.

 

GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.

 

VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!

 

GUS: That’s a new one.

 

VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?

 

GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.

 

VANESSA: I don’t.

 

GUS: I’m not a racist.

 

VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.

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.

Arabesques
A Novel

The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.

Debt
Poems

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

 

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

 

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

 

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

 

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

Lucky Girls
Stories

“It was a misunderstanding,” her daughter said. “It was a cultural thing, actually.” And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, “He’s not a rapist.”

 

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if he raped you, he is a rapist.”

 

And Mandy said, “Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.”

Green Squall
Poems

           And the sky!

Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm

Of an empty nursery.

 

Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.

 

The grass was lizarding,

Green and on a rampage.

 

Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.

 

Noon. This noon –

Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.

The grass was lizarding

WHITE
A Play

VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?

 

GUS: I’m sure I have.

 

VANESSA: I see.

 

GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.

 

VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!

 

GUS: That’s a new one.

 

VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?

 

GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.

 

VANESSA: I don’t.

 

GUS: I’m not a racist.

 

VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.

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.

Arabesques
A Novel

The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.