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.

Fieldwork
A Novel

Everyone in anthro knows it, it’s an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you’re you; and when you come back, you’re not you anymore, but they’re still them.

Joan of Arkansas

Last year, Simone had been voted “Most Christ-Like” of the Domremy Catholic High School Freshman Class. 
            Privately, she hoped that she did have God’s grace to thank for her ease in the world. Something about grace, even though one need not do anything to receive it, denoted heroism. It was heroism in the sense of being singled out and chosen—an idea that accounted for and made tolerable the ways in which Simone felt entirely alone.
            Nothing, she knew, had been easy for Joan—nothing except talking to God. “If you want God to talk to you, you have to be silent,” Simone knew from one of Joan’s videos. She had attempted silence in every form she could fathom but even her attempts felt loud. How to empty herself of her self, she wondered.

The Pleasing Hour
A Novel

The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.

 

THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

The Reef
Poems

Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,

the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.

 

She told me she had read that pressure (from

a rubber band about the head) combined with

 

lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes

keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.

 

I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,

for hope. She only had to try it once.

The Tie That Binds
A Novel

Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.

Rise
Poems

His music swims in the room’s colors,

Not making the décor any prettier,

In its war of blood and tar;

 

His bleak tone blare into blackness

Of hard luck and lights.

Easier to sit in the front row

 

With your feet propped on stage

Than to play in a room where

Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.

 

As everyone heckles advice,

Somebody tells a fable about

Dignity and the failed attempt.

Fieldwork
A Novel

Everyone in anthro knows it, it’s an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you’re you; and when you come back, you’re not you anymore, but they’re still them.

Joan of Arkansas

Last year, Simone had been voted “Most Christ-Like” of the Domremy Catholic High School Freshman Class. 
            Privately, she hoped that she did have God’s grace to thank for her ease in the world. Something about grace, even though one need not do anything to receive it, denoted heroism. It was heroism in the sense of being singled out and chosen—an idea that accounted for and made tolerable the ways in which Simone felt entirely alone.
            Nothing, she knew, had been easy for Joan—nothing except talking to God. “If you want God to talk to you, you have to be silent,” Simone knew from one of Joan’s videos. She had attempted silence in every form she could fathom but even her attempts felt loud. How to empty herself of her self, she wondered.

The Pleasing Hour
A Novel

The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.

 

THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

The Reef
Poems

Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,

the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.

 

She told me she had read that pressure (from

a rubber band about the head) combined with

 

lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes

keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.

 

I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,

for hope. She only had to try it once.

The Tie That Binds
A Novel

Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.

Rise
Poems

His music swims in the room’s colors,

Not making the décor any prettier,

In its war of blood and tar;

 

His bleak tone blare into blackness

Of hard luck and lights.

Easier to sit in the front row

 

With your feet propped on stage

Than to play in a room where

Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.

 

As everyone heckles advice,

Somebody tells a fable about

Dignity and the failed attempt.