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.
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.
In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
By the end of the day, Ji-ho had moved things around, managing, even, to reposition an oak dresser by himself, whereas our mother and I, for all the years we would occupy the middle room, would never take down my cousin’s Star Wars poster, his Carnegie Mellon pennant. Every now and then, she and I would start up the same old argument about who slept on the floor and who slept on the twin bed. Each of us trying to urge comfort on the other. Neither of us knowing how to commit an act of selfishness.
but we are still at sea we climbed into the rocking
boat again the things that we could not afford
to remember in the vernacular
sun
sinking backwards into the world’s
light industry Eros in idle hands
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.
In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
By the end of the day, Ji-ho had moved things around, managing, even, to reposition an oak dresser by himself, whereas our mother and I, for all the years we would occupy the middle room, would never take down my cousin’s Star Wars poster, his Carnegie Mellon pennant. Every now and then, she and I would start up the same old argument about who slept on the floor and who slept on the twin bed. Each of us trying to urge comfort on the other. Neither of us knowing how to commit an act of selfishness.
but we are still at sea we climbed into the rocking
boat again the things that we could not afford
to remember in the vernacular
sun
sinking backwards into the world’s
light industry Eros in idle hands