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.

Cities in Motion
Poems

Often they seem to be falling forward

but I pretend not to notice

how well they use their bodies:

the girl, that tall delicate boy,

even the father in pink satin –

ardent, flashy. Now something scares me

and I turn away.

 

                        In the dream

they walk the beach –

my children and their father –

equally exposed, ridiculous suits

in the same ice-cream colors.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
A Novel

At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.

The Coast of Good Intentions
Stories

…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.

Green Squall
Poems

           And the sky!

Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm

Of an empty nursery.

 

Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.

 

The grass was lizarding,

Green and on a rampage.

 

Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.

 

Noon. This noon –

Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.

The grass was lizarding

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
A Novel

At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.

Tony and Susan
A Novel

In the unrealistic days of their marriage there was a question whether she would read what he wrote. He was a beginner and she is a tougher critic than she meant to be. It was touchy, her embarrassment, his resentment. Now in his letter he said, damn! but this book is good. How much he had learned about life and craft. He wanted to show her, let her read and see, judge for herself. She was the best critic he ever had, he said. She could help him too, for in spite of its merits he was afraid the novel lacked something. She would know, she could tell him. Take your time, he said, scribble a few words, whatever pops into your head. Signed, “Your old Edward still remembering.”

Cities in Motion
Poems

Often they seem to be falling forward

but I pretend not to notice

how well they use their bodies:

the girl, that tall delicate boy,

even the father in pink satin –

ardent, flashy. Now something scares me

and I turn away.

 

                        In the dream

they walk the beach –

my children and their father –

equally exposed, ridiculous suits

in the same ice-cream colors.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
A Novel

At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.

The Coast of Good Intentions
Stories

…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.

Green Squall
Poems

           And the sky!

Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm

Of an empty nursery.

 

Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.

 

The grass was lizarding,

Green and on a rampage.

 

Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.

 

Noon. This noon –

Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.

The grass was lizarding

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
A Novel

At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.

Tony and Susan
A Novel

In the unrealistic days of their marriage there was a question whether she would read what he wrote. He was a beginner and she is a tougher critic than she meant to be. It was touchy, her embarrassment, his resentment. Now in his letter he said, damn! but this book is good. How much he had learned about life and craft. He wanted to show her, let her read and see, judge for herself. She was the best critic he ever had, he said. She could help him too, for in spite of its merits he was afraid the novel lacked something. She would know, she could tell him. Take your time, he said, scribble a few words, whatever pops into your head. Signed, “Your old Edward still remembering.”