Whiting Award Winners

In the New Yorker, Chiasson writes of Plath's letter to her former psychiatrist. He notes that "as her letters, more than any other documents, reveal, Plath monitored life from behind a façade of chipper enthusiasm. Her genius took shape hidden by this screen." 

Hayes and Smith are the two Americans on the shortlist, whose collections Chair Sinéad Morrissey said "offer an invigorated language, confident mastery of form, and fresh, sophisticated perspectives on our uncertain times." 

"He has a good memory, but a better imagination," the reviewer writes of Hayes, "and that allows him to imagine a better future, despite what he remembers of the past." The piece praises the strength of the language used in the collection.

In the Kenyon Review, Sherwin Bitsui shares two poems from his new collection. "Bluing under a dimming North Star,/ the Reservation’s ghost/ paws cartilage pincered from a digital cloud," he writes.

The New York Times calls Wray's new novel, about a Californian teen girl who becomes embroiled in the frontlines of war in Afghanistan, " a significant literary performance."

"I think the mind is more flexible and responsive to a word’s textures and potential when you can step away from monolingualism," muses Kane in an interview about the Inupiaq community, myth, and what makes a poem seem personal.

"If you ask me, I’ll say no, Thank you, I don’t need to watch what goes/ Only imagining itself seen," writes Jericho Brown, in a poem published by The New Republic. 

On Poets.org, Major Jackson writes about poet Ai's "dedication to both her aesthetic and ethical vision," and how she inspired a generation of poets.

In the Guardian, Smith talks about why she "can't stop thinking about" Deana Lawson's photography, the McCarthy-era opera that is a "a powerful vehicle for these feelings of being found and seen and ratified by love," and other works of art she's been inspired by.

Offutt delves into his writing process, Appalachian culture, and why  "writing fiction is the best way I’ve found to quell the restlessness of my mind."

Lacey remarks on returning home to Mississippi and, with it, the white women who wear heels to football games and a "particular brand of Southern femininity," for The Believer. " I do not love," she writes, "the place I am obliged to call home." 

Wang's story "What Terrible Thing It Was" is featured in the anthology, edited by Roxane Gay, alongside work by Emma Cline, Curtis Sittenfeld, and more.

In Ploughshares, an essay on the use of form in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins argues, "Tonally dynamic and sonically pleasing, these poems insist there’s no difference between high and low diction/culture/art, especially when you’re writing for your life." 

Laurentiis shares his recommendations for Frank Bidart's "Ellen West," mixed media artist Devan Shimoyama, television show "Feud: Bette and Joan," and more.

Tracy K. Smith discusses parallels between poetry and the Bible, such as metaphor, and says that "poetry is one of the languages that puts us in touch with our higher selves." 

Catherine Barnett reads Symborska's poem "Maybe All This" and discusses the work with New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young. "I don't think that that person, the speaker who is alone, is pathetic," Barnett remarks. "I think the aloneness is a pulling together of the split self into a whole." 

A review in the Los Angeles Review of Books remarks on the use of love in Tracy K. Smith's newest collection Wade in the Water, observing that, in Smith's work, "love dwells in paradox." 

In the Adroit Journal, Guest's new poem explores themes of rejection with the line "In the night, in that benign darkness, I sing what I’m not able to bear."

Sayrafiezadeh's New Yorker story explores the acting dreams of a New York construction worker, who boldly declares of his ambition,  "The more I dreamed, the more vivid the dream seemed to be, until it was no longer some faint dot situated on an improbable time line but, rather, my destiny."

Image Journal discusses how poets Carl Phillips, Leslie Harrison, and Whiting winner Shane McCrae use innovative poetic lines, calling McCrae's work  "an act of great empathy and exposure."

In the New Yorker, Whiting winner Dan Chiasson writes about fellow winner Forrest Gander's latest collection, a "chronology of loss," describing the book as "a self-suturing wound, equal parts bridge and void."

"The New Testament, daringly juxtaposes the sacred and the profane, and in doing so encourages us to reconsider those very terms," writes The Guardian, praising Brown's "powerful" subversion of religious verses.