Whiting Award Winners

Boyer speaks candidly about capitalism, illness, and her own writing process. "If I perceive my own weakness or my own occluded vision or some moment in which I am not up to the task of discerning some truth or seeking an idea," she explains, "I just include that in the writing."

Ocean Vuong and Colson Whitehead have been longlisted for the award, in recognition of their novels On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and The Nickel Boys, respectively.

The Brooklyn Rail writes that Whitehead's latest novel is "a reminder of where we have been and a warning not to go there again."

The Irish Times writes that Mehta's latest book, an argument for immigration as a form of reparations, "demolishes xenophobia."

Greenidge, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, discusses the important role that research plays in her fiction writing, including making fictional work more realistic and introducing readers to knowledge that they would not otherwise have access to.

The New York Times says Ruefle's National Book Award-nominated latest collection "records small moments with sweeping scope, moments in which the speed of thought seems to outpace real time."

"Wayne’s work has legs,” library curator Tim Young said. “He has found all sorts of innovative ways to think about and discuss culture." His work joins that of other important contemporary writers - such as David Rakoff, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams - housed at the library.

"I try to be generous to my characters," Gloss explains, "even the ones I know I wouldn't like if we meet in reallife [...] And I try to love them even when they're not doing loveable things."

"I want to make sure men know it's possible for them to have feelings and that those feelings are okay to have," Brown remarks during his interview with the magazine. "I think our world would have us believe they're not okay to have."

Whiting winners Tyehimba Jess, Darryl Pinckney, and ZZ Packer all contributed original work to the project, which examines the legacy of slavery in America.

Tupelo Quartlerly calls Kaminsky's collection "stunning," and declares that his latest work "links the ubiquity of ignorance with its destructive outcomes."

"They serve their masters most/ quickly after They have devised a plan to kill their masters," declares a new poem by McCrae featured in The Baffler.

In an excerpt from her new book The Undying, featured in Harper's magazine, Boyer reflects, "There is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed, how it falls so quickly from the place we make love to the place we might die in."

"Boyer's writing explicitly uses language as a bridge from body to body," the magazine writes of Boyer's latest, a book of memoir and criticism about her experience surviving breast cancer.

The Whiting Foundation regrets the passing of masterful poet Jane Mead, Whiting 1992, a poet who "draws a sustaining record of the only feeling worth the struggle." (C.D. Wright)

Row waxes poetric on the (shoulder injury-inducing) titles he read over the summer, the book everyone should own, writing advice from Liz Phair, and more.

Open magazine writes that Suketu Mehta's latest, an argument in favor of immigration as reparations, contains "a rage borne from moral clarity and fostered by the truth."

Mansour worked with fellow playwright Kareem Fahmy and the Lark Theatre on the launch of an essential new Middle Eastern America Writers Lab, a new program designed to engage a diverse group of writers at all points in their processes and careers.

"The more we use our screens, it seems, the more power we assign to books as objects, and to turning their literal pages as a timeless icon of languor," muses Chiasson in a piece on Leah Price's new book and reading in print, for the New Yorker.

"These days, a great many people in the rich countries complain loudly about migration from the poor ones. But as the migrants see it, the game was rigged," writes Suketu Mehta, in an excerpt from his new book This Land Is Our Land featured on Bloomberg Quint.

"Everyone is No one./ But someone/ could be Someone/ in the vertical/ topography/of gods—" muses Dana Levin, in a new poem for the Adroit Journal.

Row writes about selective love of literature, whitness, and epiphanies, in the Paris Review, musing that "Love, which drives us toward literature in the first place, may be the thing that prevents us from achieving it."

Mehta discusses the movitation behind his new book about immigration, This Land Is Our Land, by explaining that "a populist is a gifted storyteller—someone who can tell a false story well. The only way to fight him is by telling a true story better."

Nafissa Thompson-Spires explains that the goal of a writer "should be to tell the truth in some way, even if it's to tell it slant – or to imagine a better version of the truth" and more in this interview with The Guardian.