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.
The precision of the map allowed Maria to read the planet’s history like a type of braille. As hinted by the initial data, the northern hemisphere proved to be the smoothest surface that had ever been observed in the solar system. Most of the terrain seemed to tilt slightly to the north, suggesting that a planetwide drainage system may have once emptied there, into a great northern ocean. Inscribed onto the surface was even a possible shoreline, Deuteronilus, which could be traced for thousands of kilometers. The coast ran along nearly the same elevation, with variations that could be explained by the ground rebounding, exhaling as the weight of a sea of long-gone water evaporated. With each new detail Maria plotted, another aspect of Mars’s history came to life.
Mars Global Surveyor changed what it meant to see a planet. If the old map of Mars was a simple picture, the new map was a portrait. It went beyond what our eyes could take in, capturing data on contours, on composition, on forces we could not see—not just topography but things like magnetic signals and mineral compositions measured out beyond the visible wavelengths. There were subtleties to be seen—we just had to get there, and when we got there, we had to know how to look.
Excerpt(s) from The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson, copyright © 2020 by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.
The misspelling stopped her.
“Next in line,” a teller called.
Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”
Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged
with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered
for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,
cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love
the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.
Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles
to the inferred shoreline.
My ex answers your call like shit is sweet, says, Good to hear from you, so fake you want to reach through the receiver. Next thing, she drops the phone minus nary a pardon and leaves you on an indefinite hold soundtracked by the blare of some rap video cranked beyond good sense. Meanwhile, you carry the noisy cordless into another room, crack the blinds, and watch a pair of baseheads, both thin as antennas, push a half-wrecked sedan down the street. The baseheads, they’ve got the sedan’s doors flung open, and seethe at each other across a scrappy ragtop roof. Farther, they jog their hooptie to a slow cruise, jump in on the run, and sputter off. It’s still plenty of lightweight action on the set. The old lady dressed in a who-gives-a-what-about-the-heat getup (down coat, snow boots, thick wool scarf) tugging a shopping cart full of thrashed cans. Down a ways, boys riding wheelies for distance on dirt bikes with mismatched rims.
The precision of the map allowed Maria to read the planet’s history like a type of braille. As hinted by the initial data, the northern hemisphere proved to be the smoothest surface that had ever been observed in the solar system. Most of the terrain seemed to tilt slightly to the north, suggesting that a planetwide drainage system may have once emptied there, into a great northern ocean. Inscribed onto the surface was even a possible shoreline, Deuteronilus, which could be traced for thousands of kilometers. The coast ran along nearly the same elevation, with variations that could be explained by the ground rebounding, exhaling as the weight of a sea of long-gone water evaporated. With each new detail Maria plotted, another aspect of Mars’s history came to life.
Mars Global Surveyor changed what it meant to see a planet. If the old map of Mars was a simple picture, the new map was a portrait. It went beyond what our eyes could take in, capturing data on contours, on composition, on forces we could not see—not just topography but things like magnetic signals and mineral compositions measured out beyond the visible wavelengths. There were subtleties to be seen—we just had to get there, and when we got there, we had to know how to look.
Excerpt(s) from The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson, copyright © 2020 by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
We had dozens of books. My father never bought us toys, and he always claimed that he was too broke to buy us new clothes, but somehow we each received at least three new books each month. Most of our books were nonfiction - short biographies, children’s encyclopedias, textbooks - because Dad was convinced that novels were for entertainment purposes only, and he always told us that we would have time for entertainment when we were old enough to make our own decisions. So Tayo and I would huddle in a single bed, his or mine, with a biography about George Washington, or a book about the invention of the telephone, and each of us would read a page and hand the flashlight over.
We eventually grew tired of these books, though, so we began to make up our own stories. Actually, Tayo made them up. Even though Tayo was younger than me, even though he looked up to me and followed me in every other part of our lives, he was a much better storyteller than I was. He was almost as good as Mom.
He always began:
“Once upon a time . . .”
Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.
The misspelling stopped her.
“Next in line,” a teller called.
Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”
Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged
with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered
for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,
cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love
the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.
Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles
to the inferred shoreline.
My ex answers your call like shit is sweet, says, Good to hear from you, so fake you want to reach through the receiver. Next thing, she drops the phone minus nary a pardon and leaves you on an indefinite hold soundtracked by the blare of some rap video cranked beyond good sense. Meanwhile, you carry the noisy cordless into another room, crack the blinds, and watch a pair of baseheads, both thin as antennas, push a half-wrecked sedan down the street. The baseheads, they’ve got the sedan’s doors flung open, and seethe at each other across a scrappy ragtop roof. Farther, they jog their hooptie to a slow cruise, jump in on the run, and sputter off. It’s still plenty of lightweight action on the set. The old lady dressed in a who-gives-a-what-about-the-heat getup (down coat, snow boots, thick wool scarf) tugging a shopping cart full of thrashed cans. Down a ways, boys riding wheelies for distance on dirt bikes with mismatched rims.