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.

WHEREAS
Poems

I don't trust nobody

 

             but the land I said

 

I don't mean

 

present company

 

of course

 

you understand the grasses

 

hear me too always

 

present the grasses

 

confident grasses polite

 

command to shhhhh

 

shhh listen

Please
Poems

IV. On Graduate School

 

Grass for acres and trees tall,

Then, everywhere there should be

Some harvest to guard, sprouts

A building in which I am mistaken

For a broom, handled as such,

And given to the floor. To dust.

I am here to learn: that which fears me

Must be crow

In this hall of heavy doors

Where my body is a blemish.

Rise
Poems

His music swims in the room’s colors,

Not making the décor any prettier,

In its war of blood and tar;

 

His bleak tone blare into blackness

Of hard luck and lights.

Easier to sit in the front row

 

With your feet propped on stage

Than to play in a room where

Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.

 

As everyone heckles advice,

Somebody tells a fable about

Dignity and the failed attempt.

The Pleasing Hour
A Novel

The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.

 

THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

A Partial History of Lost Causes
A Novel

I told him about the nucleotides, the genetic test, the prognosis. I told him that atrophying of basal ganglia starts years before symptoms present, and that right now—in this car, in this moment—parts of my brain were dying, parts that I didn’t know I needed, but parts that I would never, never be able to get back. I told him that there wasn’t an emotion or an impulse or a stumble that I could completely trust; I told him that one day—if I let it—everything I did and said and thought would be nothing more than the entropic implosion of a condemned building or a dying star.

Worn: A People’s History of Clothing

Today, it is no longer cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them. A task that once fell within the province of the ordinary household is now an esoteric hobby, requiring skills out of reach to most ordinary Americans. It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt. A curious reversal.

Ralph Tharpe, the former design engineer at Cone Mills in North Carolina, and the man responsible for making denim for Levi’s 501s during the 1970s, put the question to me this way: “Why is it that from 1960 to today the price of a Ford truck has increased ten times over and the price of a pair of dungarees has stayed the same?” This question becomes even more puzzling when one considers that many mass-manufacturing processes have been automated since the 1960s but sewing is not one of them. The process one follows to sew a garment has not changed materially since the advent of the sewing machine. Fabric is a fussy and unpredictable material, unlike sheet metal, that still requires the subtle manipulation of tension that can only be done by a real human hand.

How then, did this happen?

WHEREAS
Poems

I don't trust nobody

 

             but the land I said

 

I don't mean

 

present company

 

of course

 

you understand the grasses

 

hear me too always

 

present the grasses

 

confident grasses polite

 

command to shhhhh

 

shhh listen

Please
Poems

IV. On Graduate School

 

Grass for acres and trees tall,

Then, everywhere there should be

Some harvest to guard, sprouts

A building in which I am mistaken

For a broom, handled as such,

And given to the floor. To dust.

I am here to learn: that which fears me

Must be crow

In this hall of heavy doors

Where my body is a blemish.

Rise
Poems

His music swims in the room’s colors,

Not making the décor any prettier,

In its war of blood and tar;

 

His bleak tone blare into blackness

Of hard luck and lights.

Easier to sit in the front row

 

With your feet propped on stage

Than to play in a room where

Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.

 

As everyone heckles advice,

Somebody tells a fable about

Dignity and the failed attempt.

The Pleasing Hour
A Novel

The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.

 

THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

A Partial History of Lost Causes
A Novel

I told him about the nucleotides, the genetic test, the prognosis. I told him that atrophying of basal ganglia starts years before symptoms present, and that right now—in this car, in this moment—parts of my brain were dying, parts that I didn’t know I needed, but parts that I would never, never be able to get back. I told him that there wasn’t an emotion or an impulse or a stumble that I could completely trust; I told him that one day—if I let it—everything I did and said and thought would be nothing more than the entropic implosion of a condemned building or a dying star.

Worn: A People’s History of Clothing

Today, it is no longer cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them. A task that once fell within the province of the ordinary household is now an esoteric hobby, requiring skills out of reach to most ordinary Americans. It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt. A curious reversal.

Ralph Tharpe, the former design engineer at Cone Mills in North Carolina, and the man responsible for making denim for Levi’s 501s during the 1970s, put the question to me this way: “Why is it that from 1960 to today the price of a Ford truck has increased ten times over and the price of a pair of dungarees has stayed the same?” This question becomes even more puzzling when one considers that many mass-manufacturing processes have been automated since the 1960s but sewing is not one of them. The process one follows to sew a garment has not changed materially since the advent of the sewing machine. Fabric is a fussy and unpredictable material, unlike sheet metal, that still requires the subtle manipulation of tension that can only be done by a real human hand.

How then, did this happen?