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.
Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.
Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving
eastward, indiscriminate, original.
Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,
our nature disobediently tends toward nature.
My family’s experience isn’t fodder
for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs
But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?
Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game
Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil
Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company
and I am descended from a long line of wildfires
I mean tribal leaders
The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off
I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?
Six months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.
There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.
Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.
Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving
eastward, indiscriminate, original.
Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,
our nature disobediently tends toward nature.
My family’s experience isn’t fodder
for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs
But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?
Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game
Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil
Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company
and I am descended from a long line of wildfires
I mean tribal leaders
The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off
I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?
Six months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.
There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.