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.

Apricots from Chernobyl
Essays

The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.

I'm Always So Serious: Poems

        The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails


        as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of


        this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know


        close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.

Kingdom Animalia
Poems

On the way home, going,

with the hill & mammoth clouds

behind me, rushing to the house

before the rain, those beautiful Pakistani girls,

their faces happy as poppies, I thought, those girls

rushing home as I was rushing home

to beat the first small pieces

of rain falling down

like nickels in departing light. There

was the laughing of the beautiful girls,

shrieking gulls, five or six of them (depending

on whether I count myself), the bright

& shining planets of their dresses

lifting, just so, in the wind. & their black hairs.

& the black sound of horses, horses

hoofing it home, the click

& clop of their patent leather hooves—Still, it touches

my ear, this sound. I touch

my heart. I can’t stop touching

my heart & saying, Today is my birthday,

you see? For the beautiful clamor of planets

dressed as girls who, running home, have heads.

Whose heads swing black night, running home

on the black feet of horses, from the rain.

Now I understand. Today is my birthday.

It is Thursday, my day. My black day.

Whoredom in Kimmage
The World of Irish Women

I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…

In the Belly
Poems

There’s a kind of sky below the ocean –

a field of starfish, turning slowly

like cogs inside

a water-watch, wound by a sea river;

the star’s five fingers tremble and

reach for a clam’s book of meat,

into which it will inject a sedative

and then its stomach.

 

In The City, escaped parrots colonize

a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that

In a bag? More hits after this…

Kentucky Straight
Stories

The tow truck lurched a few yards, dappling everyone with mud. Bobby’s ruined knee spurted a red arc. Then another. And another. The men watched, bewildered and afraid. They had slaughtered hogs in autumn and field-dressed deer in the woods. They’d seen mangled men dragged from the mines—crushed, turned blue from lack of oxygen, charred by a shaft fire. But none had watched a man slowly die.

Apricots from Chernobyl
Essays

The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.

I'm Always So Serious: Poems

        The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails


        as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of


        this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know


        close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.

Kingdom Animalia
Poems

On the way home, going,

with the hill & mammoth clouds

behind me, rushing to the house

before the rain, those beautiful Pakistani girls,

their faces happy as poppies, I thought, those girls

rushing home as I was rushing home

to beat the first small pieces

of rain falling down

like nickels in departing light. There

was the laughing of the beautiful girls,

shrieking gulls, five or six of them (depending

on whether I count myself), the bright

& shining planets of their dresses

lifting, just so, in the wind. & their black hairs.

& the black sound of horses, horses

hoofing it home, the click

& clop of their patent leather hooves—Still, it touches

my ear, this sound. I touch

my heart. I can’t stop touching

my heart & saying, Today is my birthday,

you see? For the beautiful clamor of planets

dressed as girls who, running home, have heads.

Whose heads swing black night, running home

on the black feet of horses, from the rain.

Now I understand. Today is my birthday.

It is Thursday, my day. My black day.

Whoredom in Kimmage
The World of Irish Women

I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…

In the Belly
Poems

There’s a kind of sky below the ocean –

a field of starfish, turning slowly

like cogs inside

a water-watch, wound by a sea river;

the star’s five fingers tremble and

reach for a clam’s book of meat,

into which it will inject a sedative

and then its stomach.

 

In The City, escaped parrots colonize

a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that

In a bag? More hits after this…

Kentucky Straight
Stories

The tow truck lurched a few yards, dappling everyone with mud. Bobby’s ruined knee spurted a red arc. Then another. And another. The men watched, bewildered and afraid. They had slaughtered hogs in autumn and field-dressed deer in the woods. They’d seen mangled men dragged from the mines—crushed, turned blue from lack of oxygen, charred by a shaft fire. But none had watched a man slowly die.