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.

Wedding Day
Poems

Six monarch butterfly cocoons

            Clinging to the back of your throat –

 

            you could feel their gold wings trembling.

 

You were alarmed. You felt infested.

In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,

            gagging to spit them out –

                        and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

We unyoke owl pellets from marrow

in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,

 

a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy

dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark

 

beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist

with my hand.

Out There
Mavericks of Black Literature

The experience of reading Sex and Race is one of embrace and recoil as Rogers indiscriminately loads us down with the provable and the forever dodgy, the serious and the frivolous. Sometimes his footnotes, not always adequate or acceptable, tell when he was at work on a given aspect of his subject, in the way that an itemized credit card bill is a diary, a record of movement. The references go in clusters: in the 1920s, he was reading about Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia; in the 1930s, he was reading the memoirs of English travelers in Africa. Sometimes, he clearly couldn’t go back to a particular library or text to check his facts again. And sometimes Sex and Race reads as though it had threatened to consume him, because the first-person voice breaks through in the book at times of what could be called narrative stress.

Exactly What Happened
Poems

And so with the last of my birthday cash

I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.

The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror

and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)

as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.

I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed

the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words

I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel

their cocks, cripple their families and pets.

 

The kit came and of course was crap.

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.

Lost in Translation
A Life in a New Language

We don’t have the remotest idea of what we might find or do there, but America—Canada in our minds is automatically subsumed under that category—has for us the old fabulous associations: streets paved with gold, the goose that laid the golden egg. There is also that book about Canada from the war. And, my father reminds my mother, whose impulses really draw her toward Israel, in Canada there is no war, and there never will be. Canada is the land of peace. In Israel, there’s a constant danger of war, and they take even girls into the army. Does she want her daughters to end up on a battlefield? Does she herself want to go through a war again?

Wedding Day
Poems

Six monarch butterfly cocoons

            Clinging to the back of your throat –

 

            you could feel their gold wings trembling.

 

You were alarmed. You felt infested.

In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,

            gagging to spit them out –

                        and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

We unyoke owl pellets from marrow

in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,

 

a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy

dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark

 

beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist

with my hand.

Out There
Mavericks of Black Literature

The experience of reading Sex and Race is one of embrace and recoil as Rogers indiscriminately loads us down with the provable and the forever dodgy, the serious and the frivolous. Sometimes his footnotes, not always adequate or acceptable, tell when he was at work on a given aspect of his subject, in the way that an itemized credit card bill is a diary, a record of movement. The references go in clusters: in the 1920s, he was reading about Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia; in the 1930s, he was reading the memoirs of English travelers in Africa. Sometimes, he clearly couldn’t go back to a particular library or text to check his facts again. And sometimes Sex and Race reads as though it had threatened to consume him, because the first-person voice breaks through in the book at times of what could be called narrative stress.

Exactly What Happened
Poems

And so with the last of my birthday cash

I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.

The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror

and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)

as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.

I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed

the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words

I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel

their cocks, cripple their families and pets.

 

The kit came and of course was crap.

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.

Lost in Translation
A Life in a New Language

We don’t have the remotest idea of what we might find or do there, but America—Canada in our minds is automatically subsumed under that category—has for us the old fabulous associations: streets paved with gold, the goose that laid the golden egg. There is also that book about Canada from the war. And, my father reminds my mother, whose impulses really draw her toward Israel, in Canada there is no war, and there never will be. Canada is the land of peace. In Israel, there’s a constant danger of war, and they take even girls into the army. Does she want her daughters to end up on a battlefield? Does she herself want to go through a war again?