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.

Barbells of the Gods
Poems

Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you

in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look

for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.

Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that

we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened

between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let

the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,

to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to

make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth

and yell across the lawns to her.

The Island Itself
Poems

From a side lane soft with lunar mulch

and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone

on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties

as wide as an elephant’s forehead.

I sighed across the boy-mown lawn

and they shook as though they shed blessings

to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.

Who would dare pour such panties

along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.

The Milky Way was pavement

compared to their luxury. I knew

I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.

 

Next morning my feet felt like mallets.

I was back in the world where people

wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,

and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.

TwERK
Poems

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.

                            hyphy dancehall — no can

               hear tings demur.

titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer

whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.

                            ain’t neck breaking like dutty

               when she whine.

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?

The Internationalist
A Play

SARA

I don't think $20 is much for a bribe.

 

LOWELL

Isn't it? American? I was hoping it was a whole hell of a lot.

 

SARA

Maybe. Guys who work in airports make a lot of funny money different ways.

 

LOWELL

Oh but, oh, well. Yeah. Fuck. Well it was my first bribe.

Stories in Another Language

I thought, I bet the daughter’s glad she’s dead, because what her mother was doing, throwing herself into the grave on top of the box like that, looked funny. It looked funny because her mother was fat, and it looked so much like the mother was doing the Fat Man Dance, because her arms were spread out too, as if she were waiting for her daughter to spread out her arms also, and then they could hold hands and smack bellies together and dance in circles on the box just the way we always did in the summer when we did the Fat Man Dance. Because we always did the Fat Man Dance in the summer when we ran around with no clothes on and danced a lot because it was summer.

Rainy Season
Haiti - Then and Now

…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.

Barbells of the Gods
Poems

Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you

in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look

for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.

Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that

we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened

between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let

the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,

to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to

make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth

and yell across the lawns to her.

The Island Itself
Poems

From a side lane soft with lunar mulch

and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone

on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties

as wide as an elephant’s forehead.

I sighed across the boy-mown lawn

and they shook as though they shed blessings

to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.

Who would dare pour such panties

along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.

The Milky Way was pavement

compared to their luxury. I knew

I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.

 

Next morning my feet felt like mallets.

I was back in the world where people

wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,

and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.

TwERK
Poems

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.

                            hyphy dancehall — no can

               hear tings demur.

titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer

whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.

                            ain’t neck breaking like dutty

               when she whine.

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?

The Internationalist
A Play

SARA

I don't think $20 is much for a bribe.

 

LOWELL

Isn't it? American? I was hoping it was a whole hell of a lot.

 

SARA

Maybe. Guys who work in airports make a lot of funny money different ways.

 

LOWELL

Oh but, oh, well. Yeah. Fuck. Well it was my first bribe.

Stories in Another Language

I thought, I bet the daughter’s glad she’s dead, because what her mother was doing, throwing herself into the grave on top of the box like that, looked funny. It looked funny because her mother was fat, and it looked so much like the mother was doing the Fat Man Dance, because her arms were spread out too, as if she were waiting for her daughter to spread out her arms also, and then they could hold hands and smack bellies together and dance in circles on the box just the way we always did in the summer when we did the Fat Man Dance. Because we always did the Fat Man Dance in the summer when we ran around with no clothes on and danced a lot because it was summer.

Rainy Season
Haiti - Then and Now

…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.