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.
I am a cowry girl, a marine biologist to be exact. The 8-hour move-
ment started in the United States in 1884. Feeling more and more.
Gave birth. Took up the question. 8 hours shall be the norm. Marx:
Slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor with a white skin
cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded.
The time named. Endorse the same. Half of the same. More pro-
foundly. Therefore be considered a synonym.
The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.
His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”
The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.
And so with the last of my birthday cash
I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.
The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror
and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)
as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.
I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed
the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words
I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel
their cocks, cripple their families and pets.
The kit came and of course was crap.
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 . . .”
I am a cowry girl, a marine biologist to be exact. The 8-hour move-
ment started in the United States in 1884. Feeling more and more.
Gave birth. Took up the question. 8 hours shall be the norm. Marx:
Slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor with a white skin
cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded.
The time named. Endorse the same. Half of the same. More pro-
foundly. Therefore be considered a synonym.
The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.
His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”
The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.
And so with the last of my birthday cash
I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.
The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror
and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)
as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.
I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed
the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words
I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel
their cocks, cripple their families and pets.
The kit came and of course was crap.
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 . . .”