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.

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.

The Adamant
Poems

Mountain tips soften after so much rain,

the wild guesses of birds blending with air

and the uppermost buds, with a godlike

promotion, burst open.

 

Especially beautiful

are the brown and drunken bats

who nosedive down the barnside,

not quite earthbroken.

The Ice at the Bottom of the World
Stories

We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.

The Abstract Wild
Essays

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. In this, wilderness is no different from music, painting, poetry, or love: you concede the abundance and try to respond with grace.

Insectopedia

With careless hands a child kills an ant. Flies are far trickier, though once caught, they have little chance. And, if darting birds don’t grab them first, butterflies die natural deaths; few people—collectors excepted—willfully still such tremulous beauty.

Bedouin Hornbook
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1

The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…

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.

The Adamant
Poems

Mountain tips soften after so much rain,

the wild guesses of birds blending with air

and the uppermost buds, with a godlike

promotion, burst open.

 

Especially beautiful

are the brown and drunken bats

who nosedive down the barnside,

not quite earthbroken.

The Ice at the Bottom of the World
Stories

We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.

The Abstract Wild
Essays

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. In this, wilderness is no different from music, painting, poetry, or love: you concede the abundance and try to respond with grace.

Insectopedia

With careless hands a child kills an ant. Flies are far trickier, though once caught, they have little chance. And, if darting birds don’t grab them first, butterflies die natural deaths; few people—collectors excepted—willfully still such tremulous beauty.

Bedouin Hornbook
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1

The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…