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.

Kapitoil
A Novel

The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.

We Sinners
A Novel

Her plan had been to clean in the middle of the night, so her mother would wake to an empty kitchen sink, but as she stood in the foyer, the bathroom fan beating loudly and uselessly, the mess before her made her want to cry; being in a family of eleven made her want to cry, the way someone had soaked up the dog’s pee but not thrown away the paper towel, the way responsibility divided by eleven meant no one was really responsible.

Dancing in Odessa
Poems

I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—

she rides a wild pony for my birthday,

a white pony on the seventh floor.

 

“And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”

the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.

At the center of my life: my mother dances,

 

yes here, as in childhood, my mother

asks to describe the stages of my happiness—

she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:

 

between the regiments of saucers and towels,

she moves so fast—she is motionless,

opening and closing doors.

 

But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!

My mother's past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.

I drew an axis through the afternoon

 

to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—

young, not young—my mother

gallops a pony on the seventh floor.

 

She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens

what is shut, shuts what is open.

Nature Poem

My family’s experience isn’t fodder

for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs

 

But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?

 

Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game

 

Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil

 

Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company

and I am descended from a long line of wildfires

I mean tribal leaders

 

The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off

 

I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

The Cormorant Hunter's Wife
Poems

I live brokenly and assemble together

Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip

Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,

 

Its brux. From the lip of a wooden

Bowl carved from the knot of a limb

Drifted, my name was given on water

 

And laid down like hail upon my tongue.

It’s become a bewilderment of white –

It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.

Come to This Court and Cry
How The Holocaust Ends

She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.


Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.

Kapitoil
A Novel

The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.

We Sinners
A Novel

Her plan had been to clean in the middle of the night, so her mother would wake to an empty kitchen sink, but as she stood in the foyer, the bathroom fan beating loudly and uselessly, the mess before her made her want to cry; being in a family of eleven made her want to cry, the way someone had soaked up the dog’s pee but not thrown away the paper towel, the way responsibility divided by eleven meant no one was really responsible.

Dancing in Odessa
Poems

I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—

she rides a wild pony for my birthday,

a white pony on the seventh floor.

 

“And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”

the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.

At the center of my life: my mother dances,

 

yes here, as in childhood, my mother

asks to describe the stages of my happiness—

she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:

 

between the regiments of saucers and towels,

she moves so fast—she is motionless,

opening and closing doors.

 

But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!

My mother's past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.

I drew an axis through the afternoon

 

to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—

young, not young—my mother

gallops a pony on the seventh floor.

 

She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens

what is shut, shuts what is open.

Nature Poem

My family’s experience isn’t fodder

for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs

 

But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?

 

Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game

 

Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil

 

Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company

and I am descended from a long line of wildfires

I mean tribal leaders

 

The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off

 

I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

The Cormorant Hunter's Wife
Poems

I live brokenly and assemble together

Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip

Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,

 

Its brux. From the lip of a wooden

Bowl carved from the knot of a limb

Drifted, my name was given on water

 

And laid down like hail upon my tongue.

It’s become a bewilderment of white –

It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.

Come to This Court and Cry
How The Holocaust Ends

She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.


Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.