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.

Mule
Poems

And we divorced in the survives            and O

It was a comedy            and first you ever slept with me

And marry me and marry me and O

 

How fat I used to be

A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living
A Novel

In 1959, Prentice Ross astounded his parents by enrolling in aviation school instead of going to Yale. Of course, being generous and humane people, Prentice’s parents didn’t have anything against pilots per se. It just happened that they had never met one, nor had they ever even thought of how a person became one. In fact, they knew not a single person who drove any machine at all (for a living, that is), so they were at a loss when they tried to imagine what their son’s future would be like.

The Reef
Poems

Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,

the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.

 

She told me she had read that pressure (from

a rubber band about the head) combined with

 

lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes

keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.

 

I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,

for hope. She only had to try it once.

Bedouin Hornbook
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1

The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…

Harper's Magazine
January 2005

I've lurked in chat rooms with discussion threads devoted to such subjects as “A previously unknown Albert Goodell brace found in the wild.” One sweltering summer morning, on the Jay County fairgrounds in the farming village of Portland, Indiana, I walked among fabulous machines as small as schnauzers and as huge as elephants, all gleaming in the August sun. Drive belts whirred, flywheels revolved, pistons fired, and a forest of smokestacks piped foul smoke and rude music into the otherwise cloudless sky. Mostly, I have ridden a Midwestern circuit of flea markets and farm auctions in the passenger seat of an emerald green Toyota pickup truck piloted by a fifty-five-year-old botanist with a ponytail, spectacles like windowpanes, and a beard verging on the Whitmanesque.

Fantasia for the Man in Blue
Poems

I

 

What a lucky beast I am,

when he cleans up nice

 

and nicks his perfect face.

I get to lick that face,

 

when he lets me.

In the cut’s opening

 

I get a taste of him

from the inside

 

out, which is all I have

ever wanted,

 

to be cell-close

to him. Praise the razor’s

 

overzealous arm;

the ease

 

with which it finds tenderness

in this man.

Mule
Poems

And we divorced in the survives            and O

It was a comedy            and first you ever slept with me

And marry me and marry me and O

 

How fat I used to be

A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living
A Novel

In 1959, Prentice Ross astounded his parents by enrolling in aviation school instead of going to Yale. Of course, being generous and humane people, Prentice’s parents didn’t have anything against pilots per se. It just happened that they had never met one, nor had they ever even thought of how a person became one. In fact, they knew not a single person who drove any machine at all (for a living, that is), so they were at a loss when they tried to imagine what their son’s future would be like.

The Reef
Poems

Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,

the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.

 

She told me she had read that pressure (from

a rubber band about the head) combined with

 

lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes

keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.

 

I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,

for hope. She only had to try it once.

Bedouin Hornbook
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Vol. 1

The snow was blackened by automobile exhaust and the corpse, while alive, had been known as Opposable Thumb. As the stout man knelt and mumbled a prayer the small boy looked on. (I vaguely recalled having watched Opposable Thumb’s burial on television, so it struck me as odd that the body could be there in this other place.) The stout man stood up, leaning over the corpse and speaking words which, again, I couldn’t make out. I could, however, see that the corpse’s head was made of plastic, somewhat like a doll’s…

Harper's Magazine
January 2005

I've lurked in chat rooms with discussion threads devoted to such subjects as “A previously unknown Albert Goodell brace found in the wild.” One sweltering summer morning, on the Jay County fairgrounds in the farming village of Portland, Indiana, I walked among fabulous machines as small as schnauzers and as huge as elephants, all gleaming in the August sun. Drive belts whirred, flywheels revolved, pistons fired, and a forest of smokestacks piped foul smoke and rude music into the otherwise cloudless sky. Mostly, I have ridden a Midwestern circuit of flea markets and farm auctions in the passenger seat of an emerald green Toyota pickup truck piloted by a fifty-five-year-old botanist with a ponytail, spectacles like windowpanes, and a beard verging on the Whitmanesque.

Fantasia for the Man in Blue
Poems

I

 

What a lucky beast I am,

when he cleans up nice

 

and nicks his perfect face.

I get to lick that face,

 

when he lets me.

In the cut’s opening

 

I get a taste of him

from the inside

 

out, which is all I have

ever wanted,

 

to be cell-close

to him. Praise the razor’s

 

overzealous arm;

the ease

 

with which it finds tenderness

in this man.