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.

Break It Down
Stories

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
Stories

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.

The Here and Now
A Novel

“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”

 

“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”

 

“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”

 

I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”

Science & Steepleflower
Poems

Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged

with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered

for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,

cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love

the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.

Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles

to the inferred shoreline.

Garments Against Women

There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.

Other People's Troubles
Poems

In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book

of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,

which we sit down to look over,

my rather recognizes for certain only

the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,

Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:

“Your mother has breasts,”

the children would say as they passed,

and frothing with rage he would give chase

some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.

Break It Down
Stories

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
Stories

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.

The Here and Now
A Novel

“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”

 

“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”

 

“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”

 

I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”

Science & Steepleflower
Poems

Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged

with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered

for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,

cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love

the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.

Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles

to the inferred shoreline.

Garments Against Women

There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.

Other People's Troubles
Poems

In the gone world of Roman Vishniac’s book

of photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe,

which we sit down to look over,

my rather recognizes for certain only

the village idiot of a Munkács neighborhood,

Meyer “Tsits,” whom they use to tease:

“Your mother has breasts,”

the children would say as they passed,

and frothing with rage he would give chase

some years before breasts and Meyer were ash.