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.
The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.
I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.
But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.
There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.
Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.
…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.
By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².
It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.
I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.
In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³
I note the absence of the word “Arab.”
Still, they do not sense us⁴.
The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.
I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.
But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.
There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.
Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.
…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.
By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².
It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.
I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.
In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³
I note the absence of the word “Arab.”
Still, they do not sense us⁴.