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 Right Hand of Sleep
A Novel

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.

TwERK
Poems

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.

                            hyphy dancehall — no can

               hear tings demur.

titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer

whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.

                            ain’t neck breaking like dutty

               when she whine.

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?

The Sobbing School
Poems

Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t 

stop leaving. I don’t know how

to name what I don’t know

 

well enough to render

in a single sitting. Every poem

about us seems an impossible labor,

 

like forgetting the face

of the sea, or trying to find

a more perfect name for water.

Things That Are
Essays

In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.

Passionate Minds
Women Rewriting the World

Because there were no available roles for a woman who drove men wild and enjoyed them in bed by the dozen and gave as good as she got and didn’t want to marry and never suffered for any of it, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. She began her literary career with a sketch for a vaudeville act in 1913, when she was twenty and her fame still rested largely on her ability to perform a well-advertised “muscle dance in a sitting position.” By the time her first successful theatrical opus, entitled Sex, got her arrested in New York, in 1927, she’d been honing her playwriting skill alongside her nonpareil shimmy and cooch for over a decade.

The Right Hand of Sleep
A Novel

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.

TwERK
Poems

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.

                            hyphy dancehall — no can

               hear tings demur.

titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer

whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.

                            ain’t neck breaking like dutty

               when she whine.

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?

The Sobbing School
Poems

Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t 

stop leaving. I don’t know how

to name what I don’t know

 

well enough to render

in a single sitting. Every poem

about us seems an impossible labor,

 

like forgetting the face

of the sea, or trying to find

a more perfect name for water.

Things That Are
Essays

In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.

Passionate Minds
Women Rewriting the World

Because there were no available roles for a woman who drove men wild and enjoyed them in bed by the dozen and gave as good as she got and didn’t want to marry and never suffered for any of it, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. She began her literary career with a sketch for a vaudeville act in 1913, when she was twenty and her fame still rested largely on her ability to perform a well-advertised “muscle dance in a sitting position.” By the time her first successful theatrical opus, entitled Sex, got her arrested in New York, in 1927, she’d been honing her playwriting skill alongside her nonpareil shimmy and cooch for over a decade.