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.

Notes for My Body Double
Poems

…what of the glowing spine,

what of the toy stings of stock footage flames,

what of the jets you swatted dead

from the air with unmistakable joy,

you of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh,

you of the palsied fury, you

of the put-upon by dissemblers and disturbers,

you, what of the life burned

so cheaply into celluloid we are charmed…

Bluest Nude
Poems

The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking

brushes the air between us like a wet mark

 

stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead

twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.

 

Robyne, who, when someone hurls 

toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.

 

My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins

I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.

Mississippi
An American Journey

One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”

Bad Alchemy
Poems

I love American newspapers, the way each section

is folded independently and believes it owns

the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-

 

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.

I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say

 

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although

no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

 

busting inside them. I go back to the sports section

and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face

keeping all the wrong emotions in check.

Volt
Stories

He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.

Romey's Order

Come the marrow-hours when he couldn’t sleep,

the boy river-brinked and chorded.

 

Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided.

Sieved our alluvial sounds—

Notes for My Body Double
Poems

…what of the glowing spine,

what of the toy stings of stock footage flames,

what of the jets you swatted dead

from the air with unmistakable joy,

you of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh,

you of the palsied fury, you

of the put-upon by dissemblers and disturbers,

you, what of the life burned

so cheaply into celluloid we are charmed…

Bluest Nude
Poems

The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking

brushes the air between us like a wet mark

 

stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead

twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.

 

Robyne, who, when someone hurls 

toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.

 

My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins

I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.

Mississippi
An American Journey

One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”

Bad Alchemy
Poems

I love American newspapers, the way each section

is folded independently and believes it owns

the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-

 

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.

I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say

 

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although

no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

 

busting inside them. I go back to the sports section

and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face

keeping all the wrong emotions in check.

Volt
Stories

He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.

Romey's Order

Come the marrow-hours when he couldn’t sleep,

the boy river-brinked and chorded.

 

Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided.

Sieved our alluvial sounds—