Whiting Award Winners

In his latest collection, Phillips ruminates on violans and violence, on hatred, on turning forty-three, and eve on the end of existence itself. "Phillips’s latest is lyrical, imaginative, and steeped in a keen understanding of current events," writes Publishers Weekly.

Everyone who ever died is still here, and Linda can communicate with them. If you believe, she can make you hear them, too — in the thin place, the fragile boundary between our world and the other one. The New York Times writes, "Lucas Hnath is haunting Playwrights Horizons. A cunning new play, compelling and delicious."

Pulitzer-winner Guirgis's Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven is about the harrowing, humorous, and heartbreaking inner workings of a women's halfway house in New York City. Ben Brantley writes in the New York Times that Guirgis's latest is "a vibrant and expansive comic drama with heaving humanity, surging vitality and diversity! [...] I wish I had the space to describe every performance."

In Find Me, Aciman explores Sami, the father of character Elio, whom he first introduced to readers in Call Me By Your Name. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever. Meanwhile, Elio has an affair in Paris and Oliver contemplates in a return trip across the Atlantic. The New York Times writes that Find Me "strikes an affectingly melancholy chord.”

Mary Ruefle's latest collection explores the act and intensity of poem-making, with the poet's usual imaginative flourishes and unique sensibility. Publishers Weekly calls the collection "a giddy, incisive ode to failure, fragility, and unknowing."

Boyer's memoir of surviving aggressive triple-negative breast cancer explores the experience of illness mediated by digital screens, the ecological costs of chemotherapy, the literary line of women writing about their illnesses, and more. Sally Rooney writes of that book: "Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself."

 White Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. Jess Row examines the ways writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engage with race, and then looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. "We should accompany Row through this important inquiry," the New York Times writes of White Flights.

Suketu Mehta scrutinizes the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash, explaining how the fear of immigrants is negatively impacting the West. Immigrants, Mehta illustrates, bring great benefits, enabling countires and communities to flourish. 

Vuong's first novel is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. 

A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport. In order to understand this indefensible decision, the story must return to the moment decades earlier when a young man enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam and puts in motion an unimaginable chain of events. "Scibona," The New York Times Book Review writes, "has built a masterpiece." 

The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown explores fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma, leaving no stone unturned. Craig Morgan Teicher writes, "Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."

Talk show host Matthew Miller has made his fame by exposing bizarre secrets of society, but remains a mystery. When the high school students responsible for a mass shooting are found to be devoted fans, Mattie is thrust into the glare of public scrutiny. Soon, the secrets of his past push their way to the surface. Kirkus Reviews calls The Spectators "Elegant, enigmatic, and haunting.”