Whiting Award Winners

The Tribune calls Wang “a visionary,” writing that her novel about a burned-out Ph.D. candidate pondering her Chinese heritage and an upcoming marriage “has crafted a narrative that manages to be both restrained and explosive.”

The LA Review of Books writes that Pico’s latest is full of “poems that are complex yet accessible, that sound like 2018 but that have staying power long past it,” comparing the poet to Frank O’Hara.

Jonathan Farmer discusses how the latest book differs from McCrae’s previous work, meditates on his relationship to the book as a white reader, and praises the “power” of McCrae’s poems.

In The Nation, writer J. Robert Lennon pens a moving tribute to Johnson’s life and his final collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. "It wasn’t that his books failed to conform to expectations,” Lennon writes. “It was that his talent was too slippery to set them in the first place."

"It’s as though racism has always been the action and dealing with it the reaction," Pinckney reflects in his New York Review of Books piece on Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornell West, and afro-pessimism.

The magazine writes that Koestenbaum’s latest collection “mixing conscious states like color” and declares that, “for Koestenbaum, art is no therapy or escape. It simply tags along, delivering beauty un-deliberated.”

Chee talks about how writing characters for fiction and nonfiction differs, and what inspires him to write about difficult aspects of his life.

Mask calls Pico’s newest book-length poem – about topics ranging from Janet Jackson to right-wing politicians – “his most formally and thematically impressive work yet.”

The Guardian calls Klam “a deft hand at juxtaposition” and praises his ability to “evoke a sense of absurdity, but without resort to exaggeration.”

In a new poem for Poetry magazine, Corral’s narrator articulates an impending death, and laments “An animal/ is prowling/ this station. It shimmies with hunger./ It shimmers/ with thirst./ To keep it away,/ I hurl my memories at it.”

William T. Vollman doesn't own a cellphone, once submitted a 3,800-page long manuscript, and sleeps with Sacramento's homeless community under the stars. Sactown Magazine profiles the writer and calls his new work about climate change "a discursive masterpiece.”

The Poet Laureate, recently elected to a second term, discusses bringing poetry to “rural areas where most writers are unlikely to visit” and how poetry can provoke honest conversation.

Vollman talks about drones, drinking with pro-nuclear power plant engineers, and what gives him hope for the future.

A new poem by Brown explores a father-son bond through both men’s relationship to a daughter: “We stand together on our block, me and my son,/ Neighbors saying our face is the same, but I know/ He’s better than me.”

"There is a sense in this volume that our better angels will need to become rowdier. They will need to know how to handle themselves in a brawl," writes Dwight Garner. He goes on to call the collection "scorching." 

The Whiting Foundation regrets the passing of exceptional writer Joan Chase, Whiting 1987, "an archaeologist of our recent past and present, reading our traces back to us, showing us to ourselves freshly discovered and understood." (Russell Banks)

Calling Pico’s previous work “stellar,” Publishers Weekly says that his latest book “is a therapeutic process for poet and reader alike” and gives Junk a starred review.

Greenidge interviews fellow winner, Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, about forming the Dark Room Collective and why her “hope is to create spaces where people of all stripes can come together and speak at a lower decibel level.”

TIME talks to the poet, whose new collection Wade in the Water explores race and the Civil War, about visiting an Air Force base and what poetry has in common with prayer.

For Lambda Literary, Brown talks about why the power of poetry doesn’t need to be eternal, reflecting on a recent church experience to declare that “poetry is not interested in seeing itself last forever. It is a force that means to move us now.”

In the Times, fellow poet Craig Morgan Teicher remarks “few poets write like Li-Young Lee these days, facing the biggest and broadest questions head-on,” praising Lee’s “enormous sensuality.”

For ESPNW, Glock writes an ode to the Olympic women who inspired her in her youth and continue to inspire her today.

Salon calls the memoir a “poetic and empathetic work whose message — the border is built on an imaginary line, but its impact on the people who cross it, or can't, is real — feels more urgent this year than ever.”

Call Me Zebra is “at its heart a novel about the powerful role of literature in self-discovery,” writes the literary blog, praising Van der Vliet Oloomi’s to pull the reader into her character’s mind.