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.

Blackspace
On the Poetics of an Afrofuture

Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.

Playing in Time
Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.

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 Time of the Novel

When I put in my notice at the bookstore, the manager—a heavy-set woman in her mid-forties who often spoke in monosyllabic bursts—curtly replied, “We’re sorry to see you go.” Whether my employer regretted her inability to create a work environment that might have fostered my personal growth and tempted me to reconsider my options was beyond the scope of my then-nascent narrative powers, but I did not elaborate, as I did not wish to draw out the details surrounding my sudden departure. Outwardly, I feigned regret, but inside, I rejoiced: I was free, I thought, free to take leave of my post and bid my old, monotonous life among books and bookish people goodbye! A more urgent position awaited me in the form of a transparent eye. I shook the manager’s hand, and before the day was done, I updated my email account preferences so that in one week’s time, any work-related queries would receive the following automated response:

HELLO: I AM CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE. I’M CHASING A DREAM CALLED PROSE.

Beauty Before Comfort
The Story of an American Original

Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.

 

“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.

 

“Hush up, Jeannie.”

No Moon
Poems

To be inside a body that’s going to go

is not so bad. A train rushes out of a station

and by the time it’s gone around the bend

 

that town is a tiny abandoned World of Tomorrow.

Passengers looking out of the train

see the windows of warehouses are the slow in a penny arcade

 

and they tell time by the clock face of every house.

Steel springs coil inside the trees.

Then the train will pull them down the tracks

 

they can’t invent fast enough for their need to survive.

Blackspace
On the Poetics of an Afrofuture

Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.

Playing in Time
Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.

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 Time of the Novel

When I put in my notice at the bookstore, the manager—a heavy-set woman in her mid-forties who often spoke in monosyllabic bursts—curtly replied, “We’re sorry to see you go.” Whether my employer regretted her inability to create a work environment that might have fostered my personal growth and tempted me to reconsider my options was beyond the scope of my then-nascent narrative powers, but I did not elaborate, as I did not wish to draw out the details surrounding my sudden departure. Outwardly, I feigned regret, but inside, I rejoiced: I was free, I thought, free to take leave of my post and bid my old, monotonous life among books and bookish people goodbye! A more urgent position awaited me in the form of a transparent eye. I shook the manager’s hand, and before the day was done, I updated my email account preferences so that in one week’s time, any work-related queries would receive the following automated response:

HELLO: I AM CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE. I’M CHASING A DREAM CALLED PROSE.

Beauty Before Comfort
The Story of an American Original

Aneita Jean never liked the men at the Klan rallies. It scared her not to see their faces. It made her uncomfortable that they all seemed to know her daddy, and that he knew them by their raspy voices. She would watch them circling around on the hill, their crosses aflame, and snuggle closer to her father’s chest.

 

“I want to leave, daddy,” she’d say softly, fearful they might overhear and come running back, robes flapping behind like hateful phantoms.

 

“Hush up, Jeannie.”

No Moon
Poems

To be inside a body that’s going to go

is not so bad. A train rushes out of a station

and by the time it’s gone around the bend

 

that town is a tiny abandoned World of Tomorrow.

Passengers looking out of the train

see the windows of warehouses are the slow in a penny arcade

 

and they tell time by the clock face of every house.

Steel springs coil inside the trees.

Then the train will pull them down the tracks

 

they can’t invent fast enough for their need to survive.